Quick logistics note: tomorrow I will be trying to wrap up work and get on a plane home on the starting afternoon of a long holiday weekend — surely there’s no way that could turn out poorly! — and as such will likely not have time to update. Carry on, think of England, and I’ll be back soon enough.

• A webcomic that I’ve been enjoying (typically in large chunks rather than smaller updates) is Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag’s Strong Female Protagonist, a series that knows that actual Strong Female Characters don’t adhere to traditional comic book definitions of strong. Alison’s a college student, a reluctant superhero, and doesn’t know anything with certainty other than the fact that Life has more problems than can be solved by beating them up.

  It’s a cracking good read, and if you also prefer to read it in chunks, the first four chapters (some 200+ pages) are getting the requisite print collection, via the requisite Kickstarter. Launched two days ago, it’s sitting at some 250% of its (very modest) US$8000 goal, and if the FFF holds true, we’re looking at about US$42K to US$84K as a total. That means that Ostertag and Mulligan will have to come up with some new stretch goals, as right now they top out at US$25K and at this rate they’ll hit that by the end of the weekend.

• Speaking of predicted finishes, Oh Joy, Sex Toy hit its goal in about 18 hours, and the FFF leads me to estimate a final total between US$65K and US$130K, meaning the guest artists are going to be getting a nice bump to their pagerates. Hooray for smut!

  Along the same lines, it might not be possible to pull a FFF calculation for Evil Inc volume 8 because so far the trend trace is falling outside the usual parameters: it went up from day one to day two, and unusually, the one-sixth-to-one-third ratio is (partly) falling outside the bounds of success. I think I have to declare this one an outlier, but if it weren’t, it’s projected finish would be between US$7500 and US$15,000¹.

• Welcome news to all who’ve been wondering where the next Benign Kingdom projects would lead. All of the principals have been busy with other projects, but reports of the brand’s diminishment appear to have been premature. Via B9er Evan Dahm, this notice at the Kingdom Tumblr:
  

  Benign Kingdom is getting moving on some COOL NEW STUFF, and the first item of that stuff is a pair of screen printed posters by Becky Dreistadt and myself. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be putting updates on our progress!

  Go check out the roughs and tell me that isn’t gorgeous. You can’t, you liar.

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¹ Or a ratio of porn (Oh Joy, Sex Toy) to not-porn (Evil Inc volume 8) of 8.6667:1. The Smut Peddler 2014:Sleep of Reason ratio was only 2.8599:1, which also makes me think that EIv8 is skewed in this early campaign. That’s just too big a differential for how much people like porn (yes, such a statement can be made). Conclusion: I’m still at least 50 projects away from assigning a decent confidence level to the Fleen Funding Formula.

I am never going to get tired of that panel. Never.

• And luckily, Erika Moen launching a BookKicker for the first collection of Oh Joy, Sex Toy means that I get to share that little slice o’ heaven from yesterday’s strip with you. It’s the sweetness of Erika’s surprise, the ordinariness of Matt’s question that warms my oh so cynical heart.

  Okay, that and the sexytimes. Gotta love the sexytimes, which is why all people who aren’t embarrassed to love sexytimes should be picking up a copy of the book and revisit the first year’s adventures of Erika, Matt, various guest strippers¹, and the Masturbateers. Oh Joy, Sex Toy puts the fun back in sex, in a smart way that makes you happier and more educated for the journey. Plus the fact that at various reward levels you can get original art, or even drawn into the comic having sexy, sexy sex.

  Plus, because Hurricane Erika is awesome, her stretch goals involve paying her guest artists higher rates, and she’s making the payment bump retroactive. This is not just a woman that wants you to have awesome sex, she wants to support her fellow creators. That right there is worth your support. Just, you know, not from the work computer is all.

• Considerably fewer people are going to be having sex (at least, not the same way(s) as in OJ,ST) in the pages of Brad Guigar’s latest Evil, Inc collection, also conveniently being Kicked, but that’s not to say it’s not a sexy project. In fact, one could say that anything Brad Guigar does is sexy². By now you know the deal: Brad redesigns the four-panel, gag-each-day updates to read continuously and turn a strip into not merely a collection, but something more. He’s also offering the opportunity to draw you into his strip, but if you grab that reward, you’ll probably have less sex than if you got drawn into Erika’s, but you’ll possibly be more heroic with Brad.

  I’m dancing around the full story of E,Iv8 a little, but that’s because it’s disclosure time — Brad asked for feedback on his Kickstarter’s reward levels before launch, and I provided some. I don’t mind telling you his project is running, but I do feel it’s possibly a conflict of interest for me to hype it too much (although I will say that the reward levels as they stand now are very, very well designed to give you — the loyal reader! — the maximum possible reward, and you’re welcome). All that being said, I wouldn’t have brought up the campaign at all if it weren’t newsworthy, so there you are.

• The AV Club has hit two recent :01 Books releases in their latest comics review roundup (you’ll have to scroll down a little), and I’m pleased to see that they enjoyed Box Brown’s Andre The Giant and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer as much as I did. They’ve got some really nice insights that come at both books from somewhat different angles than I did, so if you haven’t read either yet, there’s more evidence that you should. And as always, thanks to Gina Gagliano and everybody at :01 for sending me advance copies of so very many very good books.

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¹ I can’t quite recall, but I believe in one case a guest literally a stripper in the usual sense of the word.

² For the second time in two days: Ladies.

As of this writing, STRIPPED is sitting at #2 on the iTunes Canada Documentary charts¹ which is good and all, but not good enough. Back and the end of the 18th century, political scientists figured the next nation to escalate to world domination would not be the United States; the 20th century, they declared, would be The Canadian Century. Alas, Canada did not come to dominate the world in that century, but there is still time in the 21st. Drive STRIPPED to #1 Canada! Then surpass your large, heavily-armed, somewhat rude southern neighbors and find a way to take STRIPPED to #0. That’ll show us!

And when you’ve done so, perhaps you’ll find some time to attend VanCAF, one of the newer crop of TCAF-emulating, modest-scale, community-involving, public-space-inhabiting, no-entry-fee comics festivals. As a bonus, VanCAF is the brainchild of onetime Tower of Babel² writer Shannon Campbell.

Only in its third year, VanCAF has attracted a wide swath of (mostly west of the Continental Divide) comics talent, including a decent chunk of Pacific Daylight webcomickers. One may, for example, find Special Guests like Natasha Allegri, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Tony Cliff, Ed Brisson, Aaron Diaz³, Madeleine Flores, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, and Kris Straub⁴.

Exhibitors (who are not necessarily special guests, but are still special in our hearts) include the likes of Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Erin Burt, Blue Delliquanti, Amy T Falcone⁶, Hazel & Bell, Kathleen Jacques⁷, Steve LeCouillard, Kel McDonald, David McGuire, Angela Melick, Alina Pete, Doug Savage, Katie & Steve Shanahan, and Anise Shaw.

Also some guy named Sam that just gets in because he’s sleeping with the showrunner. Scandal!

But apart from that lack of judgment, Campbell has done great things in only a few years, and from my mind two things stand out as the greatest:

1. VanCAF is in a reasonably-sized space, so floor maps and booth numbers aren’t needed to make sure you find your favorite creators (but there’s still one provided).
2. Every single one of those creators up there? Campbell clearly included a link to their website so I didn’t have to hunt them down. She’s gettin’ a high-five from me next time I see her.

We didn’t even mention the programming, or the fact that Campbell’s got a food cart coming to set up immediately off the showfloor. If you’re anywhere within reach of the northern Pacific ocean this weekend, VanCAF is the place to be.

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¹ DÉPOUILLÉ est assis à #2 sur les graphiques documentaires du iTunes Canada.

² That link will still be good for a while, then it will pass the way of all things.

³ Professional dapper gentleman, Tolkien scholar par excellence, and Latin Art-Throb.

⁴ Professional handsome man, I don’t know about his knowledge of Tolkien, and he ain’t Latin, but he’s dreamy. Like, Brad Guigar⁵ dreamy.

⁵ Ladies.

⁶ Twitter has it that Ms T Falcone’s fellow Strip Searchmonaut and roomie Abby Howard will be wandering the halls as an attendee.

⁷ No relation.

How’s everybody doing? I’m doing good, thanks for asking.

• STRIPPED comes to iTunes Canada tomorrow, and just like it made a run at #1 in Documentaries in the US last month, filmmakers Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are going to try to repeat the feat in the Great White North. If you live north of 49 and haven’t see the film yet, tomorrow’s a good day.
• Not to be confused with the Great White North, some time back a webcomicker by the name of Lars Brown did a two-volume story via Oni called North World and it was pretty great. I mention this because Brown has continued to make some not-your-typical sword-and-sorcery comics by the name of Penultimate Quest, and it’s time to get the second volume of PQ printed. Enter the requisite Kickstarter campaign, which has just under two weeks and just under 10% to go. Brown’s the real deal, making comics with heart, and realistic relationships, and frustrations at your lot in life, and swords. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like, please consider backing PQ2.
• Speaking of real deals that do swords and comics with heart, Jim Zub is launching a new creator-owned story (his first since Baldy and Shorty started kicking skulls in 2010; as Zub has stated, we’re on the next-to-last story arc of their adventures) in August, to be titled Wayward; if I may be permitted a moment of pure opinion, Zub’s stuff gets an automatic blind buy from me. Some of it may not turn out to be for me, but the man’s stellar hits-to-misses ratio means it’s worth plunking down four bucks to find out even if it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.

  Wayward, for the record, sounds like the finest of green tea, whisked by a senior geisha in a formal ceremony:

  Rori Lane is an outsider by nature, but moving to Tokyo to live with her single Mom has only exacerbated her weirdness. She’s feeling out of sorts, worried about fitting in and, as if that wasn’t enough, strange things are beginning to happen. Glowing symbols and patterns are starting to appear before her eyes… and she’s the only one who seems to notice.

  “Wayward is a coming of age story filled with mystery and emotion. It’s also an ass-kicking joy ride with teenagers beating the hell out of Japanese mythological monsters,” said Zub. “Steve and I built this series from the ground up to play to both our strengths. I can’t wait for people to see what we have planned.”

  In WAYWARD a group of teens living in Tokyo find a common bond in manifesting strange, supernatural abilities. As they begin to unravel the mystery behind their powers and their common source they’re drawn into a war with the vestiges of Japan’s monstrous mythic past.

  Buffy meets Spirited Away, anybody? You can bet that I’ll be finding Zub at SDCC in July and dragging as much info out of him as I can.

• Speaking of Zub, even if I weren’t blind-buying all his work I’d still pick up the next Schlock Mercenary collection (featuring a short story by Zub), which is now up for pre-order. The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse story arc set up much of late-period Schlock’s story development, was nominated for a Hugo Award, and is available in standard (US$20) and sketch (US$30) editions. For that you’ll get 160 pages of full-color mayhem, the bonus Zub-penned story, and a deep sense of personal peace and tranquility¹.

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¹ They say that the grave is very tranquil.

Post to your blog. That’s all on you, Gary, despite the email you got this morning that claimed to be from “administrator@fleen dot com” that read:

Important Company Update
*********************************

Please read carefully the attached document

**********************************

CONFIDENTIAL NOTICE: The contents of this message, including any attachments, are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the person or entity to whom the message was addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, please be advised that any dissemination, distribution, or use of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. If you received this message in error, please notify the sender. Please also permanently delete all copies of the original message and any attached documentation. Thank you.

Guess what guys that Important Company Update might not actually be legit.

Anyway, busy day, but still time to point you towards something by the always-smart Ms Shaenon K Garrity (seriously, half of what she writes is stuff I wish I’d written, even when we are of different opinions), wherein she looks at various comics awards and judges how well they’ve treated the topic of webcomics. She left out the Doug Wright Awards and the Joe Shuster Awards, but I doubt that’s because of any lingering dislike of Canadians on the part of Ms K Garrity. It’s just that they don’t have the reach of their southern cousins.

Anyway, damn good read, and I recommend it. See y’all on Monday.

Every time I read about something that Max Temkin does, I’m impressed; yesterday he may have set the bar impossibly high for future impressions, though.

Let me back up a little.

Temkin is one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity, the party game for horrible people. In his spare time, Temkin has been involved in things like the Twelve Days of Holiday Bullshit sampler pack of joy, one day of which involved Temkin and R Stevens wrangling two dozen webcomickers to produce a Funnies Section for the modern age¹. More recently, he teamed up with Kris Straub to bring PWNMEAL (the extreeeeme gaming oatmeal) to PAX East. What I’m saying is, Temkin is all about surprising people with unexpected things that will bring them joy.

Now you may recall that about three months ago, John Campbell hit a very bad place in life and engaged in behavior that caused a lot of concern for Campbell’s immediate safety². Specifically, Campbell announced publicly that unfulfilled Kickstarter pledges for Sad Picture For Children would never be fulfilled, and that inquiries would result in books being destroyed.

That’s not the sort of place that you bounce back from in twelve weeks or so, but Campbell has been showing signs of improvement, with a backers-only announcement at the end of April titled If you’d like a book you can have one. Most recently, Temkin³ appears to have successfully reached out to Campbell and … well, read it yourself:

An update from Max Temkin

Hello! My name is Max Temkin. I’m a designer from Chicago.

I am a great fan of John Campbell’s work and a backer of Sad Pictures for Children, and it’s been really hard for me to see this amazing book create so much trouble for both John and its backers.

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to John about helping to close out this project, and I’ve agreed to take over the project and fulfill the remaining books to backers. On Monday, I picked up the remaining 100 books from John’s apartment, and I’m going to work with you to distribute them fairly to people who haven’t gotten their project rewards yet.

In just a moment, you’ll receive a backer-only update with a link to a form to fill out if you didn’t get your copy of Sad Pictures for Children. We’ll do this on the honor system; there are only 100 books left, so please only fill out the survey if you didn’t get yours.

To close out this project quickly, I’m going to pay out of pocket to deliver the remaining books. All I would ask of you in return is to continue to support John’s art in the future, and continue to take risks on Kickstarter to help make new art.

Thanks for your patience, and I look forward to getting the rest of these books out to you,

– Max

P.S. I will do my best to keep up with Kickstarter backer comments, but if you need to reach me quickly with any questions or comments, I am @MaxTemkin on Twitter, my email is max.temkin@gmail.com, you can text me at (312) 857-[removed to prevent spam harvesting]. [emphasis, links original]

I don’t know that you could ever say it often enough: Max Temkin is one of the good ones. Here’s hoping that recognizing the value in distributing the remaining books is the corner that Campbell needed to turn to get back to a good place, and that a trend of improving safety and stability (mental and physical) is the result.

In lighter news, Drive is back and Dave Kellett is taunting his readers for not picking up the “hiding in plain sight” secret in today’s update. Dammit, Dave — you have a critically-lauded movie and you get all sassy.

I have some ideas about this strip, but I don’t want to spoiler anything, so I’ve placed it below the cut, below the footnotes. Drivenauts, have at it.

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¹ Another involved giving $US100,000 to various small projects that affected the lives of more than 38,000 students across the country.

² And, this being the internet, more than a little shit-flinging and casual cruelty. You know who you were.

³ Who worked with Campbell on a comic for the aforementioned Twelve Days.

(more…)

These days, there are people I think of when I think of Kickstarter — people who have run campaigns and made them work, people who are thinking of new ways to put Kickstarter to productive use, people who don’t pooch the fulfillment phase even while hitting significantly high dollar totals. In terms of Machiavellian planning skills, sheer numbers of campaigns (my estimate: at least 30), and enormous dollar figures (estimated lifetime total: US$3.9 million), you’ve got George.

But in terms of a close-to-the-ground, it’s-my-content-sitting-in-my-living-room approach to Kickstarter, it’s hard to beat the experiences of one C Spike Trotman. She’s a successful Kickstarter-er and she’s been hit up for her secret knowledge so often that she announced a while back she was just gonna do a PDF comic of how to run a Kickstarter and not have to deal with the constant queries. Individual pages of the project were shared to Tumblr over time, but other projects (including a Kickstarter for Sumt Peddler 2014: Peddle Harder¹) intervened.

Until today. I’ve just read Let’s Kickstart a Comic (And Not Screw It Up), and while it seems like a bunch of common sense to anybody that’s been eyes-open and paying attention for the past couple of years, the benefits of having all that common sense in one place are undeniable, especially since it’s only five bucks for all this wisdom. Thinking about doing a Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding campaign), especially one for comics? Do your homework (i.e.: buy this comic) first so we ain’t got to hear you complain later how you didn’t know it would be this hard. It’ll still be that hard, but at least you’ll know that going in.

In other news:

• Yep, it worked: Elon Musk is susceptible to comics.
• Bradley J² Guigar and Chris Giarrusso hit the comics shops tomorrow with the first collection of Tales from the Con.
• Christopher “Doc” Hastings and Anthony Clark absolutely killed it today. I can’t think of the last time I laughed so hard at a webcomic.
• TED talks are often a bit … let’s say somewhere between extremely optimistic and let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Then you have the ones that are just neat for the sake of being neat, such as Randall Munroe and answering unanswerable questions with the power of very approximate math.

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¹ Electric Smutalloo? The Smut Strikes Back? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Smut?

² The J stands for Jay.

I honestly can’t decide which bit of Matt Inman’s paean to his Tesla Model S I like the best. The part where Falkor the Luck Dragon makes sweet love to a Ferrari? The part where he goes into the basic indestructibility of the Model S¹? The part where he points out that if you have solar panels on your roof and plug your Model S into them, you’re not powering your vehicle with combustive explosions happening three feet from your crotch, but rather with the sun, whose explosions are 92 million miles from your crotch? I think that may be it, especially the part where he draws a graph about the distance of explosions from his crotch vs general happiness.

The kicker, of course, is Tesla doesn’t do advertising, so Elon Musk can’t hire Inman to write his ad campaigns, since Tesla doesn’t advertise. Nevertheless, the comic would be a great addition to the Tesla site, even with the occasional (prominent) naughty (your eyes will catch fire and churches will burn) naughty word included. Perhaps, given that Inman spends the second part of the comic asking Musk’s support for the actual building of the Goddamn Tesla Museum (the previous campaign only saved the grounds of Tesla’s lab; getting the museum built will require millions more), something could be worked out.

I see a quid pro quo here; Musk comes up with a hunk of change for the museum, Inman continues to make Tesla-themed comics for the Tesla website, and the social mediasphere goes crazy. Win-win-win, I’d say.

In other news, Friend of Webcomics and blogger extraordinaire Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon got interviewed t’other day by the digital arm of The Atlantic and he had some great things to say about meth dealers in Mary Worth, the stark, existential horror² of Anthony’s moustache from For Better or For Worse, and webcomics. As a result, David Willis, Ryan North, Matt Lubchansky, Jeffrey Rowland, and David Malki ! may now all plausibly claim to have been mentioned by [a small part of the media empire of] one of the most prestigious magazines in American history! Well done all on [a more than slight stretch to reach] that [semi-plausible] honor!
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¹ I like the part where he points out the Model S has a frame strong enough to support the weight of four more Model S-es on its roof

² Sadly, no stark, existential horror about the nonstop depression parade that is Funky Winkerbean.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the fact that my main PC was running a now-dead operating system and getting a more modern one on there.

• Lesson #1: This is the last Windows system I’ll ever install¹. Holy glob, “no direct update” from the most popular O/S you’ve ever made? Are you high,e very single person in Redmond, Washington?
• Lesson #2: Repopulating my feeds, getting my apps installed again², and figuring out why iTunes is pooching my podcasts is a project that will take more than a weekend.
• Lesson #3: You are never done applying fresh updates and patches. This disc of Windows 7 was pressed in the past few months, it should not need more than a hundred damn patches.
• Lesson #4: But if you have to do all this crap (instead of keeping up on what’s happening at TCAF), dual-booting to make the old data easily accessible is marginally less painful than any of the Microsoft-supplied alternatives.

So here’s what I know about webcomics today:

• TCAF was awesome. Just check out the Twitterfeed of anybody that was there, and you will quickly come to the conclusion that the only problems TCAF has is the over-abundance of situations that require a high-five, potentially leaving your high-fiving hand sore. Plus, there was a last-minute (literally, in the last hour before show wrap-up) unannounced Ryan North/Randall Munroe panel & signing, and George was sighted on the grounds of the Toronto Reference Library with something he should never, ever have: puppets of Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, meaning he now has his own private Yuko & Ananth. If you ever meet “Yuko” or “Ananth” at a convention and George is hovering nearby, maybe check for a healthy skin color, un-felty hair, and a pulse, just sayin’.
• Time’s almost up for comics professionals to nominate worthy works for this year’s Harvey Awards. How about we make sure that the utterly inexplicable absence of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible from the Eisner ballots isn’t repeated at the Harveys?

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¹ I am already in talks with these fine nerds.

² I haven’t even gone near getting Steam migrated yet. If I lose my cheevos, I’ma be pissed.

Welp, everybody’s on their way to Toronto for TCAF, where I would ask that all attendees hunt down showrunner Christopher Butcher (above) and give him a big ol’ hug¹. He’s done fantastic things with the show and for the exhibitors, and he should be acknowledged for that. Oh, and if you happen to know Butcher personally, I’ma suggest you just assume he’s in a coma from Monday until, oh, let’s say Thursday.

• For those of you not heading north, or heck, maybe you as well, let’s look to some city-specific comics-things happening in a different part of the world. Unfortunately, work kept me so busy last week when I was in San Francisco, I didn’t have the chance to drop by the Cartoon Art Museum; it’s a terrific place filled with terrific exhibits. Fortunately for all, my lack of available time didn’t prevent the CAM from continuing in its mission, a big part of which is outreach to the community and spreading the knowledge and habit of making comics to as many people as possible.

  To that end, CAM will be running cartooning classes every Sunday in July, with two parallel tracks aimed at kids (7-12) with parents², and independent youth (12-16) who already have some cartooning chops. Kids and parents sessions run 11:00am to 12:30pm, and older kids 1:30pm to 3:30pm, at a cost of US$10/person (kids + parents) or US$35 (US$30 for members) for older kids.

  Supplies are provided (although older kids are encouraged to bring their own portfolios & tools), museum admission included, and the sessions will be taught by Nina Kester (6 and 20 July) and Brian Kolm (13 and 27 July). Check out the scheduled topics for class (Ninja Turtles; Animation; Heroes & Villains; Adventure) at the ticket site (kids+parents; http://guestlistapp.com/events/251868) for more information.

• Yep, called it: Heart of the City continues its love affair with Smile today. Given that Sunday’s strip is probably part of the week’s storyline, tomorrow will likely feature Heart’s mom loving Smile, as all right-thinking people do.

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¹ Alternately, a big ol’ slug of booze. Depending on the state he’s in, it might be more appreciated than the hug.

² Up to two kids per adult; sorry, grown-ups, you need a kid with you to attend.