Oh my goodness I’m not sure which of these surprises I should share first. Coin flip! Okay!

• Raina Telgemeier — previously noted on this page (and all other pages that matter) as one of our cartooning national treasures — graphic novelist par excellence and 100-week New York Times bestselling author, must have gotten a thrill this morning on seeing some respect thrown her way by that most establishment of all cultural endeavours, the syndicated comics page.

  Smile got some love from Mark Tatulli¹ Heart of the City strip for today², and given the setup of Heart and her mom arguing about whether graphic novels count as book books, may continue to have its praises sung for the next day or so. I’m guessing that Telgemeier has got to be feeling pretty great right about now.

• About ten months ago, in the dead of the night, the greatest thing known to mankind up to that time was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. I speak, naturally of Tom McHenry’s Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery, which laid bare essential lessons about the nature of life, and horses, and the importance of mastering your horse. I’m proud to say that I joined the ranks of Horse Masters, and I have the bleeding stump of a little finger³ to prove it.

  Literally and without any exaggeration whatsoever, life could not be any better than when one is horse-mastering.

  Until now, at least for those going to TCAF this weekend, for McHenry has been busy:

  In case you missed it last night, this is a thing that exists for TCAF

  3 glow in the dark buttons, a completely unnecessary full-color instruction manual, the whole game on a horse-shaped USB drive.

  All in this stylish #HorseMaster box: pic.twitter.com/8FNsDIzMGV

  Then I wept, for I am not going to TCAF. But then McHenry assuaged my grief⁴:

  Ordering info for non-TCAF goers will come soon!

  And there was much rejoicing, and the pupae of horses everywhere did swell with quickening tendrils, waiting for the day they could ripen, and escape, and feed.

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¹ Tatulli actually does two strips and while Heart of the City is pretty okay, his silent and subversive Liō may be the most brilliant thing left in syndication.

² That link may go away in the future, so please enjoy the permanently-linked version at the top of this page.

³ Not to mention a drug habit, criminal record, and seared-in memories of too many teeth in a gaping maw to go along with it. These are the prices of ascending to the political and social elite.

⁴ And coincidentally probably removed the need on my part to physically harm one or more of the friends that would go to TCAF, for a true Horse Master would let nothing stand in his or her way of obtaining this treasure; not family, not friendship, not blood. Oh glob, so much blood.

Before we get to some things that are happening in the various places, one piece of catching-up: remember what I said about big items yesterday? I missed one: Anthony Clark has a new sketchbook up for sale that clocks in at nearly 400 pages. It’s pay-what-you want, with a minimum that’s less than a dollar per hundred pages, available at Gumroad and/or Sellfy.

• The Society of Illustrators may have finished up with the actual festival aspects of this year’s MoCCA Fest, but that doesn’t mean that all MoCCA-related activities have ceased until next spring. One may recall that SoI instituted an awards program for work appearing at MoCCA Fest, and the winners are the subject of an exhibit that opened in the Society’s second floor gallery last night and runs through the 24th. Along with the exhibit, two other things are happening:
  

  All materials chosen in the jury’s initial survey will be acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the MoCCA Arts Festival collection, to be expanded annually.

  A Happy Hour and Celebration will take place in the third floor Hall of Fame Dining Room on May 21st beginning at 5pm. A $5 cover charge will go towards the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Fund.

• Oh, and if you’re in New York City on 15 May, there’s a lecture/reception/signing for Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer. Short review (of a copy graciously sent to my by Gina Gagliano at :01 Books): it’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.
• Tangentially related, I don’t know if anybody ever looks at the member’s bulletin board section of the SoI website, but you know what I noticed there today? Job listings. Anybody want to head up the Sequential Arts department at SCAD? They’re looking. Brad Guigar, this is your chance to not just teach arts entrepreneurship, but to remake an entire generation of comics kids in your own image. Your boisterous, eternally-laughing image.
• There’s other stuff going on this month in other cities, but let’s just make today about New York and call it good. Original MoCCA showrunner Kristen Siebecker once again breaks out the booze and education for the latest iteration of Popping Your Cork. This time it’s Thursday, 29 May at 6:30pm in Chelsea for a look at wines from around the US. It’s twenty five bucks to register, but because you are reading this page and Kristen likes us, she’s given us a discount code good for 15% off the tuition; just type in FRIEND10 when checking out, and enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Topic, scope, scale, ambition — everything I see today is ambitious and/or large.

• The first actual human-human primate, not one of the near-humans that are scattered in our evolutionary past, and the very first one to take it in mind to leave Africa behind and seek out the larger world? Ambitious. Large story eventually (if not quite yet), and it’s from living master of the comics form, Jeff Smith. We’ve spoken of Tüki Save The Humans before, but now those of you inclined to support creators that give you free entertainment can do so — the first issue of Tüki is solicited for a July release, the first Jeff Smith comic in pert-near two years. It may be playing out slow, but it’s thoroughly and entirely a Jeff Smith story, and that means it’s damn good.
• Nearly 2700 color comics, a sprawling cast, and storylines that go to weird places taking all the damn time they need¹? Huge. Such a story needs sizable book collections, and with 900 strips in each of the first three reprint volumes, Jeph Jacques² could have kept pattern for the fourth Questionable Content collection, but instead he went bigger. Only 200 comics this time, but printed half-a-comic to a page, QC volume 4 clocks in at 560 friggin’ pages while keeping the US$18 price point. Watch for the earlier volumes to eventually be reprinted into this form factor, leading obsessive completists (damn you, Jeph!) to have to buy them over again.
• Know what’s even friggin’ huger than Jeph Jacques (both personally, and as a body of work), André “The Giant” Rousimoff, most famous professional wrestler of all times and subject of Box Brown’s André The Giant: The Life and Legend, a book which I greatly enjoyed. You can enjoy it now too, as today is launch day for Mr Brown and Mr The Giant, or at least check out the starred review from Kirkus.
• I’m not sure that anybody has engaged in more expansive worldbuilding than Evan Dahm, whose Overside stories now comprise thousands of pages of comics, tens of thousands of years of history, and story locations sweeping from continent to continent, culture to culture, and alphabet to alphabet. And now, because he loves you, Dahm is sharing a good chunk of the miscellany related to Overside — promotional art, illustrations, sketches, things that fit into the existing stories and things no doubt meant for future stories, extensive commentary, eight years worth in all — and put it into one massive art book at Gumroad on a pay-what-you-want (five dollar minimum) basis.

  And just in case you’re the sort to think that five bucks is too much to pay for just about 100 pages, kindly forgo your next dead-tree comic which is probably priced between three and five bucks for 22 to 26 pages, plus ads. That one piece of a massive, linewide crossover that will change everything!!³ will be forgotten in a fortnight; Overside has a way of sticking with you.

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¹ Holy crap, was Marigold’s Hermione and Ginny fanfic really 900 strips ago? Damn, son.

² Himself a giant of a man.

³ No it won’t.

Relatively quiet weekend, relatively busy Monday. Let’s do this.

• Oh my, that blew up further than I thought it would; the last four days of Smut Peddler 2014 were in the top six days of the full campaign, and the final total just cleared US$185K, for creator bonuses of a staggering $US1700. Well done Spike, and everybody that loves the porns. Which, based upon the previous SP collection and the Sleep of Reason collection, leads us to the conclusion that porn is 2.8599 times as popular as horror.
• Speaking of Kickstarts, the latest book from Johnny Wander creators Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya¹ has just gone up, meaning you’ve got a chance to get a copy of Cuttings in a handsome hardcover, or an even-handsomer limited-edition hardcover. It would appear that this collection also includes perhaps my favorite Ota/Panagariya collaboration: PONY COP. Everybody jump on this so I can get PONY COP in a handsome hardcover book, please. As of this writing, Cuttings is just shy of 40% of the way to goal, which is just shy of 60% too little. Step it up, people. Do it for the children.
• TCAF, one of the best shows on the comics show calendar, runs this weekend in a now certified crack-smokin’-mayor-free Toronto. Today, the full programming slate was released, with multiple tracks of goodness packing the two days. There’s a full track for children (Kean Soo! Jeff Smith! Dave Roman! Ben Hatke! Raina Telgemeier!² Kazu Kibuishi! And many more!), a Canadian reading series (Tony Cliff! Karl Kerschl!Jillian & Mariko Tamaki! And more!), round tables and interviews and profiles (Lynn Johnston! Chip Zdarsky! Jeet Heer! Box Brown! Spike! Katie Shanahan! Rachel Duke! Mike Maihack! Noelle Stevenson! Kate Leth! Tom Spurgeon! Heidi Macdonald! Kate Beaton! Meredith Gran! KC Green! Tom McHenry! Jess Fink! Faith Erin Hicks! Becky Cloonan! Cameron Stewart! Becky Dreistadt! Ryan North!), and, of course, George.

  If you think I’m linking to anybody other than the mononymic George, you’re crazy.

• Not to do with Kickstarts, Cuttings, cats, or comics arts festivals, and possibly my even mentioning it could spiral out of control and cause the creator in question to ‘splode, but what the heck: Randy Milholland has heard the plaintive cries of his many fans and lo he has smiled upon us. There are finally — even now, unto the seventh generation we have waited — concrete plans for the first Something*Positive collection.

  It is a long way off, and will involve a lot of work on Milholland’s part, which means that everybody that’s ever wanted a copy had better be prepared to step the crap up and make a purchase³ when the time comes.

  And there was much rejoicing.

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¹ Who were apparently cats all this time. Who knew?

² Speaking of Telgemeier, she’s just reached an astonishing 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for Smile. Wowzers.

³ I am speaking here directly to the many, many people that have bitched to Randy over the years that because he did a donation drive to quit his day job and draw the strip a decade ago that they are entitled to as much free entertainment as they see fit to demand from him. Without fail, these people are never in Milholland’s records as actually having donated, but they have a massive sense of entitlement anyway. Time to quit the passive-aggressive games and prepare to finally drop some cash, fakers.

Two things for you in the meantime:

1. A wide-ranging set of opinions from [web]comics creators on the Great comiXology App-Shift of Fourteen, from Ron Perazza’s Comic Book Think Tank; I was surprised by how wide-ranging, even within the span of one creator’s opinion. For example, John Allison is approaching the issue from at least three different perspective simultaneously:
   

   Viewed from any angle, ComiXology/Amazon should give people pause.

   The 30% pay-to-play on in-app purchases within the Apple store’s walled garden is obscene. Comixology Submit’s creator deal was an equitable 50/50 split – after a corporate giant took a vast cut. This inevitably pushed prices up.

   A rump of entitled ComiXology users complaining that their method of reading comics just got *slightly less incredibly efficient* is laughable. One assumes that getting off one’s ass is still not part of the new way to buy titles through ComiXology.

   Amazon’s ownership of ComiXology will have an immediate hammer-down on prices, just like every other sector they’ve been involved in. Amazon’s near-monopoly has sucked a greater part of the life, and money, out of working in books, music, film.

   For the last 20 or so years, comic books have cost more than they were worth. Now get ready for them to cost much less than they’re worth. Get ready to lose your local comic shop, like you lost your local record store and your local bookshop.

2. I picked up the first print volume of Cleopatra in Space by Mike Maihack, and it’s wonderful. Best part: it says “Book One” right on the cover, and in the back it says Cleo will be back in Book Two! Worst part: Book Two won’t be until April, 2015. Boooo, I want more Cleo now.

Okay, time to go get Freedom Fondled. Be good, see you on Monday.

I’ve been thinking about something that might be more suited to coverage tomorrow, but work-related travel may make that impractical. It might be even more appropriate to Monday morning, but regular work means that the majority of my embloggenation happens at lunchtime, and that’ll be too late. So it’s today, Thursday, one of the lesser days of the week, where we discuss it. Feel free to check how my thoughts actually pan out in a couple of days.

Smut Peddler 2014 is currently sitting (as I write this) at US$136,624 on a goal of US$20,000; the FFF predicted a finish of US$133-266K, so yay it’ll land within my excessively wide margin of error.

The question now is, as we enter the last 100 hours or so, will an end-campaign bounce take place? SP2012 had a mid-campaign spike and no real uptick at the end; SP2014 has followed the usual long tail, and may need a final, exciting stretch goal to prompt a sudden spike in funding.

Here’s the other thing I’m very much wondering about — lots of web-type people note that their traffic is highest on Monday, lowest on the weekend; SP2014 finishes just before noon EDT on Monday. Will the relatively low weekend internet browsing levels work against a final spurt? Will the fact that it finishes on a Monday mean that people happen across one last-minute link and get impulsive? It would be very tough to put an effective control on Kickstarter project analyses for launch day and wrap day, but I have a feeling that launching on a Monday (to catch high traffic) and finishing on a Tuesday or Wednesday (to catch high traffic for the this is your last chance reminders) would possibly be most effective. Ask me when we’ve got another 1000 or so webcomics campaigns we can dig through for data. In any event, come Monday (so to speak) we’ll be able to quantify exactly how much people like porn.

Speaking of Kickstarts, click here. Did you spontaneously exclaim Oh man, I love Baman Piderman? No? Then take an hour of your life and watch the shorts because honestly, the only people that don’t spontaneously exclaim are those that are watching Bamanm Piderman for the first time. For about three and a half years, starting about five years ago, Baman Piderman has been a labor of love, and in order to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, creators Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera are looking for a quite modest sum of money (US$50,000) to make five episodes, each running probably about five minutes. In an actual animation studio, that US$50K wouldn’t cover craft services¹ for a week.

But still! Fifty thousand dollars is a lot! Consider, though: US$10K/episode or US$2K/minute gives a budget of US$33.33 per second of animation, or about two bucks for each of 15 frames per second. Are you willing to draw a couple-ten thousand very precisely designed pictures for two bucks a pop? How long would it take you to draw each of those, and would it be worth your time? Fifty grand is a bargain, and it appears that many of you agree, as the Small-Buteras² are sitting at about 90% of goal one day in (and the FFF is giving a final funding of around US$115-330K) with 29 days to go.

Seriously. Check out the shorts. You’ll love ’em.

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¹ Which under the rules of studio accounting would also incorporate the executive hookers ‘n’ blow line item.

² Or possibly Smalls-Butera.

Word comes this day that one of the Ryan North-designed tools for webcomickers, RSSPECT¹, is on the fast track to retirement:

RSSPECT: April 29th 2006 – April 30th 2014

RSSPECT was in sunset mode for the past several years (no new premium accounts two years ago, no new feeds at all one year ago), and we’d hoped that we could operate in a “last one out, turn off the lights” sort of way. It happily ran itself on a little server in NYC. We didn’t really check in on it. That was our mistake.

Unfortunately, we suffered a database loss earlier this week, and backups weren’t operating properly. Among the data lost was our users table, which tells us which feed belongs to which person. With this loss, RSSPECT has finally been put out to pasture.

I don’t know about the internal functioning of RSSPECT, but I suspect that without the users table, some feeds will have been lost and others might continue on in a mechanical fashion without much ability to control form or content beyond what was configured pre-crash. North continues:

If you liked what we did, thanks! RSSPECT was a fun little project that solved a problem for a lot of people in a pretty easy way. There are a few other sites who have followed in our footsteps, which you can find by searching for webpage into rss feed.

Thanks for using RSSPECT, and I’m sorry we couldn’t end it more gracefully.

For anybody thinking that North should have done more, keep in mind that this was far more a labo[u]r of love than a money-spinner for him (you don’t get rich off of free services), and I doubt it ever made enough money to equal the time he put into the initial development, or the effort to maintain it (at least until the relatively quiet sunset phase).

Now that he doesn’t have thoughts of What to do about winding down RSSPECT?, North will doubtless have enough spare brain juice to think up something new and neat: maybe another community tool, maybe another comic book, or CYOA book, or something completely new and yet so obvious we wonder why nobody ever thought of it before². It was a neato tool while it lasted, Ryan — RSSPECT.

In other news:

• Sean Kleefeld has some thoughts about comics that bounce from place to place (publisher to publisher in the case of floppies; site to site, collective to collective in the case of webcomics), and the requirement that you talk about what has gone before so people picking you up in a new locale aren’t lost.
• Kate Beaton has a new comic on a heroic, historically significant, and sadly neglected raiser of the right kinds of hell, Ida B Wells. Like half of Beaton’s subjects, I had basically no idea about Wells’s story (although I had heard her name, it was absent any kind of context or appreciation of all she accomplished), and like nearly all of Beaton’s subjects, this comic is compelling me to go do some reading because I know that behind these laughs are some tragic, uncomfortable, important truths.
• The usual pattern for some time has been that somebody in nerdly culture does something mind-bogglingly misogynistic and gets called on it, then Lewis’s Lawmanchild attacks on Janelle Asselin (escalating to the point of attempts to hijack her bank accounts, along with the usual death and rape threats, for the crime of being a woman in the boys clubhouse) have not died down in the usual fashion, as if the reasonable parts of [web]comics have finally had enough with the idiots who can’t stand somebody else either not liking something the way they like it, or not liking the same thing to the required degree.

  This time it feels like a corner’s turned; this time it feels like it won’t be pushing back against a particular outburst of infantile behavior, but a desire to have a permanent, standing resolve to push back against the tide of morons. Don’t feed the trolls, Just ignore them, and They don’t really mean they’re going to rape you and kill your children were never adequate responses to the anonymous and cowardly, but there wasn’t a good sense of what an appropriate response would be. I’ve seen a lot of suggestions the past couple of weeks, but the one I think I like best comes from Christopher Bird, blogger, TV critic, political writer, lawyer, webcomic author, and Canadian; he calls it The Full Cobain:

  I write a blog, I does a Twitter, I make comics. And this one goes out to the dickheads out there who seem determined to make life as difficult as possible for fangirls and geek girls and girls generally: don’t read my stuff. Just pass it by. I will make do without your eyeballs, attention, and (when there is opportunity for you to spend) monies. You are not needed; you are the fleshy little wart on the ass of Life, purely extraneous and mostly unpleasant, and I don’t want your business. [emphasis original]

  I’m adopting this; I’m not a vastly popular anything with legions of followers, but I have some and I’m declaring my intentions. If you can’t stand the thought of somebody else liking things other than exactly in the way you find best, and if you decide that along with the fact that they are female means that you can go all Scientology Fair Game on them, find another site. You’re not welcome here until you grow the fuck up.

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¹ The others being content-search tool Oh No Robot and ad marektplace Project Wonderful

² Answer: because nobody else is The Toronto Man-Mountain, that’s why.

Something made me think about Kickstarters, and the actual duration of a project.

We’ve established many a time that the end of the fundraising campaign is just the beginning of a successful crowdfunding¹; depending on how many backers you have looking for rewards, it may be a long process to get all of them happy. On the off chance that it’s going to be a long fulfillment, I recommend frequent updates and something like Rich Burlew’s Workometer, which shows after a mighty effort (and honestly, too much work for one man, even one without a half-severed thumb) he has only two pieces of fulfillment and some personalizations yet to go. Actually, let’s make that another rule of crowdfunding — it’s awesome for your backers to get caught up in the frenzy, but don’t let it happen to you without a lot of helpers.

Point being, it’s almost a given these days that a Kickstart will blow deadlines on fulfillment — whether due to scope, number of people available, injuries, postal rates changing between fundraising and actually sending things, the tax man taking a chunk on a campaign ending in Q4 but stuff not going out until the next year, or a boat nearly claimed by Poseidon’s watery grasp², the best intentions mean exactly squat. But even in the case of the heavens aligning and everything going well, there will still be bits you have to attend to.

Case in point: Ryan North has updated his To Be Or Not To Be funding campaign for the 68th time:

Everyone should have their everything

By now everyone should have their everything! We sometimes get the occasional email saying “oh hey by the way did the book come out?” and that turns me into a SAD PANDA. I wanted you to read it by now! I wanted you to be chuckling LITERALLY MONTHS AGO. So if you have not gotten your stuff, let us know directly!

At the same time, we’ve discovered that Kickstarter messages/comments aren’t the best way to do customer service (some replies were getting lost). So if you’ve sent a Kickstarter message and haven’t gotten a response, email support@breadpig.com and we’ll sort it out!

We’ve done a check of the existing Kickstarter messages recently to make sure nothing got lost and everything is settled, but I’d rather be safe than sorry (and rather you have your books than be sorry too!)

As it turns out, even North still has one bit of fulfillment to do, although not one that any particular backer is expecting to be delivered to an address, postal or physical:

I still owe you a pizza shaped like Hamlet!

YES. One final reward still outstanding. It’ll be awesome and tasty and I’m actually a little intimidated by it. The longer we wait the better it has to be. So this pizza is gonna be OFF THE HOOK.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Ryan North never quite got around to eating a pizza shaped like Hamlet, except that I’d feel bad for him having had one less tasty pizza in his life. But he made a commitment and he’s going to stick to it, dammit. And you know what? When Romeo and/or Juliet is done (a stretch goal of TBONTB), that commitment that North made — and went to heroic lengths to make good on, even to the point of literally exploding — will mean that his next campaign may well surpass what is still the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history³.

And the one after that? Bigger still.

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¹ And naturally, everything here applies equally to Indiegogo and other similar platforms; Kickstarter, like Kleenex, has reached the point of the specific term also being the generic.

² To mention just a few things that beset campaigns that I have personally backed. But on the plus side, I’ve only had one totally finished Kickstart that completely pooched fulfillment of stuff that I expected to receive (no names). I’ve also told a couple of creators “send mine last”, especially when there’s a lot of customization.

Oh, and one that’s mostly done, I got the part I really wanted, but it isn’t reasonable to expect final fulfillment yet: some day, I will have a copy of the book-of-the-film for STRIPPED. It’s only now that the film is done that Kellett and Schroeder would have time to breathe, much less bash together a coffee table book. It’s cool if they ship the poster with that book whenever it’s done, too.

³ Look, I love Planet Money, but a) screw squirrels, seriously, screw them, and b) their campaign was an act of journalism, not book publishing. So Ryan’s still number one as far as I’m concerned.

What’s that word again? Oh, yeah.

• You may recall I had some questions re: Amazon buying comiXology:
  

  Will Apple still get their cut of comiXology sales, or will Amazon (maker of the Kindle) sunset those contracts in favor of their own file formats and standards? If so, will we see fewer comics being rejected by Apple’s content police? After all, Amazon doesn’t appear to have a problem with smut, no matter how wacky. Most importantly, is it a good thing to go from a dominant player in a niche industry partnering with a (indeed, the) megacorporation to that dominant player in a niche industry being owned by a somewhat-smaller megacorporation while partnering (perhaps temporarily) with the other?

  And it appears that as of this weekend, the answers to the first two questions have changed from Dunno and Very possibly to Oh my yes and Yepper, only without the whole “sunset” part:

  Amazon has decided to avoid Apple’s 30% cut of in app purchases by removing the option from digital comic book platform Comixology for iOS users.

  The chief question in the immediate aftermath of the announcement was Who gets that 30% of revenue that was freed up, the publishers and creators? but quickly shifted to Holy crap, how will people on the dominant comiXology platform do any impulse buying?:

  For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, as of yesterday, Comixology removed the storefront from its digital reading app for comics on the iPad and iPhone. It didn’t replace it with anything, just a link that takes you out of the app to the Comixology website. No big deal, right? Just one (or two, or three, as it turns out) additional step for the fanatic comic book reader to access comics on his digital reader. Nothing to get upset about.

  Wrong. This is a very big deal, because it strikes to the heart of what made Comixology’s app a near-perfect venue for discovering and falling in love with new comics, a venue creators and publishers have been searching for since the collapse of mainstream newsstand distribution in the late 1970s-early ’80s: it destroys the casual reader’s easy access to an impulse purchase. And that’s a terrible development for the future of comics.

  Amazon did this. It did it for one reason, and one reason only: to advance their proprietary hardware platform, the Kindle, at the expense of Apple’s platform, the iPad and iPhone. They have deliberately degraded the iPad and iPhone Comixology app so that users of the Kindle will have a better reading and purchasing experience. That’s all this is about. They’ve destroyed the future of digital comics to give an advantage to their hardware platform — and, in passing, to leverage their control of digital comics distribution to do to comic book stores what they’ve already done to brick-and-mortar book stores.

  That was longtime comic book vet Gerry Conway, with what I think is the best analysis of the change so far. Barring a post (with numbers) in six months or so by Jim Zub (who is spot on in his writing on the comics industry from the creator’s view), I don’t think we’re going to get a more compelling or accepted narrative than that.

• Longtime creators showing up in new places this morning. I saw an announcement last night that Jon Rosenberg¹ has taken Scenes From A Multiverse to Hiveworks, presumably for the purposes of ensuring that Horace Greenstein, Scary Owl Lawyer stares out at as many people as possible from as many pages as possible. All hail. Meanwhile, the hallowed halls of TopatoCo are now offering the bacon-themed Diesel Sweeties collection as the powerhouses of *hampton combine forces and prepare to conquer all before them. All hail even more.

  The point being, you can’t have a static career in webcomics; Small, fast, ruthless, … all Edge is how Stevens has conducted his career, and anybody making a go of independent creation needs to adopt his methods. Rosenberg started the original FLEEN constituents of which now occupy places at the Keen empire, Halfpixel/Toonhound, TopatoCo (itself incorporating the remnants of Dayfree Press), and the mutual non-aggression pact known as Dumbrella. Having the ability to shift to the new platform, the new ad collective, the new merchandise-fulfillment channel is the essence of making sure that you don’t fall into stasis, which is just one step away from irrelevance.

• Not quite on theme, but absolutely worth mentioning: For three years or so, Gigi DG’s Cucumber Quest has been providing the lushest, most eye-pleasuring art and story, and has now reached the milestone of 500 pages. Sure, lots of comics reach 500 updates, but full page, full color, and with a sense of design so strong that merely sticking out a tongue says volumes, even if you don’t know the characters at all? That’s a rare accomplishment and everybody should congratulate Ms DG.

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¹ The guy that first started me blogging and the owner of my soul; I got a dollar for it!

Work informed me yesterday afternoon that I have to be in San Francisco next week, and I’m running around all crazylike doing a million things that need to be done (including figuring out how to get home from the airport after a redeye, as I just saw that the Port Authority will be shutting down the rail link that I use while I’m gone … until July). So all that, and yeah, next week’s posts will be on a Pacific Time schedule.

I do, however, have time to mention two things:

• Today marks eleven years of Wondermark, which would be remarkable enough even if David Malki ! weren’t doing a zillion other things in the meantime, like guerrilla interview films at comic conventions, short films about henchmen, two massive works of anthology fiction, one incredibly complex card game, inventing a new means of animation motion-capture, inventing a new means of teleprompting, engaging in a Bookwar with Ryan North, and making a feral cat into an international superstar. For the best possible simulation of what it’s like in Malki !’s head, open all those Vines in separate tabs and listen to them all play at the same time.
• And I’ll remind you all that — as was noted before in accordance with prophecy — tomorrow night at 7:00pm PDT/10:00pm EDT, the people behind STRIPPED will be hitting play on the movie and livetweeting the experience. Feel free to follow along at hashtag #strippedfilm.

Okay, back to frantic arrangements. See y’all on the left coast.