Following up on one or two things today. Maybe three. Four, tops.

• Two days since launch, 102% of funding met, now the really interesting parts of the Table Titans bookstarter begin. The book gets fancier in another US$4500 or so (as of this writing), and additional goodies appear to be stacked up at US$5000 increments thereafter. Assuming Table Titans lands somewhere in the middle of the Fleen Funding Forecast™¹ range of US$60 – 120K, we could be looking at eight or ten improvements to the final product².
• Just over two weeks from now, STRIPPED, as we have established at length, will be dropping on iTunes. For those that don’t have geographical access to iTunes (or have objections to the Apple media semiopoly), it will also be available on 2 April for HD download and streaming via VHX.tv, Google Play and other channels. What’s newly added to the mix is the announcement that also on 2 April, DVD retail sales will go live on TopatoCo, the internetty boutique of wonderful things. This gives me an indication that my Kickstarter support (at a level that guaranteed a physical disc) will be paying off with a very special package very soon. Note to self: cancel appointments that day.
• Book number two from John Allison’s Bad Machinery released yesterday, and while I have yet to pick up a copy, it’s apparently full of reworked art and story:
  

  Of all the Bad Machinery stories, this was the one that needed the most radical surgery to be ready for publication. About a quarter of the pages are brand new.

  Of particular note is the fact that even for me — I love the inside look at the process of making comics, and then making those comics into books — the skinny on how much of The Case of the Good Boy required tweaking is actually the least interesting part of that bloggening from Allison. He goes into a fascinating discussion about how Bad Machinery has changed, and how it will continue to change:

  Writing a school comic, term by term, means that the characters grow up fast. I never anticipated that the tone of the series would change so quickly. 11-year olds aren’t like 14 year-olds. They’re shorter, for one, and I’m sure a scientist could point to other differences using their expertise in the area. It’s a series where, if I’m true to myself, the later stories might not be appropriate for younger readers of the first story.

  And some good stuff on how to balance the needs of punchline every day with one complete story over six months:

  When I started writing The Case Of The Forked Road, I could see that the plot was complicated. I wanted room to keep on top of that plot as well as writing good dialogue, so I doubled the size of the strips.

  And do you know what? It worked. After a few months, people found they were able to recall every character and detail perfectly, no matter how much time had passed. No one was confused. And drawing twice as much each day actually proved to be easier than drawing less! Who knew!

  Now, what I am doing here is saying the opposite of what is true for comic effect. It was a difficult time. I find that a good indicator of chronic overwork is my sudden decision to take on even more work, which is probably why I reactivated my old strip, Bobbins, two thirds of the way through the case.

  Yeah, okay, I guess that’s pretty much how-comics-get-made stuff, too. Good stuff, you should read it.

• There are two Glorkian Warrior projects coming in the next two weeks from James Kochalka. For those of you that like books, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza (the kind folks at :01 Books were kind enough to send me a review copy) hits on the 25th; it’s a loopy, funny story, sure to please those young enough that they have to have it read to them, and those that do the reading. And tomorrow, the long-awaited Glorkian Warrior videogame (now titled Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork) releases tomorrow:
  

  My game, Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork comes out on March 14 on the iTunes app store for iphone, ipad, or ipod touch.

  Who’s going to stay up to midnight tonight to download it?

  I am! I’m buying it tonight even though it’s my own game and I can get it for free.?

  I don’t have any of those devices, but if the game is anything like the book (and I’ll wager it is), it’s going to be loopy, funny, and engaging for young and old. Even if it weren’t (which it will be), it’s ot like you’ll get anything better for less than three bucks, so pick it up and enjoy the crap out of it.

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¹ Patent pending, original formula, do not steal.

² If one of those improvements is Beholder dice bags for everybody!, Kurtz & Co will have to beat the hordes away with a stick.

• As mentioned in the recent past, Angela Melick is launching her latest Wasted Talent collection, and we now have a target pre-order go-live date: Friday, 14 March, at 11:00am PDT. Jam’s the best, note to myself to get in on that.
• Speaking of future books, Randall Munroe announced today that his What If? sideproject will be releasing a book, to be released on 2 September via Houghton-Mifflin, available in fine bookstores everywhere. The book will feature expanded versions of Munroe’s favorite questions from the past almost-two years (I’m betting that both the Ryan North–related questions make the cut), along with questions submitted that needed more time or space than the website afforded.
• The Table Titans Kickstarter, mentioned yesterday, has been up for about 27 hours as of this writing, making it the perfect time to apply the Fleen Funding Formula¹: the current Kicktraq prediction (at the 24-36 hour mark) is for US$363,500, about 1200% of goal. We divide this number by both 3 and 6, giving a range of 200-400% of goal, or US$60 – 120,000. We’ll see how well the formula works in another 28 days.
• Patreon has been a big splash in webcomics circles this calendar year. Today I learned a few things about it. One, the cofounder of Patreon is the guy from Pomplamousse. Two, it scares the bejabbers out of some creators, primarily because of fears of being indebted to backers. Three, it’s funding a new podcast series on creativity, from Brad Guigar, Scott Kurtz, and Cory Casoni². It’s that last one I want to focus on.

  If there was an announcement on the podcast (dubbed Surviving Creativity) before today, I confess I missed it. The first hint I had of it was last week when I had the good fortune to have dinner with power couple Dylan Meconis and Katie Lane³ and Dylan mentioned that she’d been recording a podcast episode with Guigar & Kurtz; I figured it was an episode of Guigar’s revived Webcomics Weekly, but nope! New venture.

  And the first creator to appear will be the aforementioned GFP, Jack Conte. This looks like one to keep your eye on, if only to get your recommended daily allowance of Guigar Giggles™ (that would be 14 seconds daily, or 150 seconds once per week).

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¹ Alternately, Fleen Funding Factor, Fleen Fudge Factor, or any other F-heavy alliterative phrase.

² Kurtz’s business guy, and deeply involved in the now-winding-down ShiftyLook.

³ Who just announced that she’s leaving the corporate job to provide services to freelancers and comickers all the time. Hire her if you care about your financial stability.

All LA-casual rumpled clothing and smiling faces. I’d buy life insurance from them if they were selling door-to-door. They being the notorious film/comic hivemind Freddave Kellett-Schroeder; they’re on the move, in these final weeks of moving STRIPPED towards a 1 April iTunes launch, and now towards a fancy-pants Hollywood premiere event:

Tickets now avail for the @strippedfilm premiere! We’re giving away 10 Watterson posters that night! http://strippedfilm.bpt.me

The skinny: Wednesday, 26 March, at the Cinearama Dome Theatre on the fabled Sunset Boulevard, from 7:00pm until they throw you out, for the low, low price US$20 (plus service fees). Be sure to dress up, there will be celebrities there, along with Messers Kellett-Schroeder. Wish I could be there, tell the paparazzi I said hi.

• Rebecca Clements has been absent from comics for a bit, something about getting a “graduate degree” in “something important that matters to the world”¹, but she’s got a new Kinokofry today, featuring everybody’s favorite blue globby dude … IN SPACE. Go, Space Engineers!
• Kristen Siebecker’s ongoing class series on How To Not Suck At Wine (not the official title) rolls on, with the next session devoted to the most elegant (and sneakily alcoholic) of boozes: champagne and other sparkling wines. Fun starts for those 21 & up at West Elm in Chelsea, on 20 March from 6:30pm. Ten percent off the cost of class if you use the super-secret discount code EMAIL10.
• Scott Kurtz has done a lot of comics, but it seems like the one with the most heart in it (if we don’t count Wedlock, but that’s lost to the ages) is Table Titans. The first year’s story arc concluded recently, which means that it’s time for the print collection, and since preorders are passé, the requisite Kickstarter launched today.

  It’s over 20% of goal in the first few hours, and by this time tomorrow we’ll be able to come up with a predicted total for the 30-day campaign by applying the Fleen Funding Factor to Kicktraq’s prediction. But honestly, we can absolutely say this one is going to hit goal, so the only question is if there are any stretch goals not yet announced that will make the book more fancy. I’m betting that there are.

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¹ Urban Planning, to be specific.

I knew that the North/Hastings/Clark Galaga strip was due to run 100 installments, and that it was about to wrap up, since we saw strip #99 last week. I also knew that the North/Hastings/Clark [disturbing, existential horror-filed] Dig Dug strip was only due to run less than two dozen strips, and that we were well past the halfway point. Jim Zub, Erik Ko & Omar Dogan’s Wonder Momo seemed to have finished one story arc and just started a second season of sorts; Shannon Campbell & Sam Logan’s Tower of Babel had just gotten started, and I didn’t have any idea how long it would run.

So while the wrap-up of Galaga today (with a long-game joke from North) and the imminent wrap-up of Dig Dug are no surprise, it appears very soon all those links will be dead, as ShiftyLook itself is wrapping up entirely in the immediate future:

Wonder Momo, Bravoman, and some other very cool characters, [are] now beloved not just in gamer circles, but at conventions, art groups, and many, many places we’d never expect. That said, now that we have successfully revived so many franchises, the heavy lifting is completed –- and so is our work. We battled the video games abyss and won, which means it’s time for us to move on and let the hit-makers play with some new toys.
For some housekeeping, here is what is happening to what at ShiftyLook (all dates JST):

CLOSING:
BRAVOMAN: Binja Bash! on the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore: In-app purchases available until March 16, 2014; download available through March 30, 2014

Namco High on ShiftyLook.com: Purchase available via Crunchyroll through March 28, 2014; servers shut down (no longer able to play) on June 30, 2014

ShiftyLook comics: Bravoman ends at #300; Wonder Momo ends at #200; Katamari ends at #150; Galaga ends at #100; Valkyrie ends at #100; Klonoa ends at #65; Tower of Babel ends at #26; Dig Dug Vol. 2 ends at #18

ShiftyLook website: No more updates after March 20, 2014; servers shut down on September 30, 2014; forums close on March 20, 2014 [boldface added]

To my eye, the Namco High announcement is the most important; the game was maybe the highest-profile project of ShiftyLook, involving a lengthy roster of web- and indy-comics creators, and which has been live only since the middle of December, if my memory serves. A server-based game that’s only live for a bit more than six months isn’t a really long lifespan, not that a minimum acceptable lifespan for such purchases¹ has ever really been established.

The creator most associated with ShiftyLook, the aforementioned Mr Zub, had some thoughts on the situation:

The original purpose of ShiftyLook, a streamlined way to reintroduce older Bandai-Namco’s IPs and put them in front of as big an audience as possible for a fraction of the cost of developing a new video game or anime, was forward thinking and had a lot of potential. If it stayed focused on that and built organically from there I think it could have fully carried through on that mandate. Once it became a corporate hot potato with bigger budgets and unrealistic expectations, it couldn’t sustain itself on a free-to-read webcomic model.

Which, to be honest, answers some of the lingering questions that I never quite managed to form into a tangible query. Chris Hastings observed back in October:

I’m also working on Galaga with Ryan … it’s a very corporate webcomic. They don’t make ANY money on it, they don’t even TRY. They just pay us.

It turns out that they thought they were going to make money, and didn’t really have a plan to make that work; when a corporation expects to make money and doesn’t, they get rid of the thing that doesn’t make money.

I’m sorry that the servers will be shutting down in some six months time; perhaps some enterprising soul will archive the entire thing so that the work done will not be lost forever. But I’m not sorry that the experiment happened, particularly since it meant work for so many of my favorite creators. According to Zub², ShiftyLook gave their creators a lot of latitude, treated them well, and had fair pay rates. If you do work for hire, that’s probably about the ideal circumstances you can find yourself in.

So good on you, ShiftyLook. Good luck, Cory Casoni and Rob Pereyda and everybody else who put in the time and effort. Thanks for the freeplay arcades, the party invites, the good booze, the good comics, and good times. It was a weird, optimistic endeavour, and webcomics was better for the attempt.

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¹ Looks like it cost on the order of US$15-20, with a significant price cut going into effect today.

² Which around these parts is the same as According to holy writ.

Let’s do this, then let’s follow Sir Patrick’s lead and have a nice drink.

• The very sexy R Stevens wants you to know about his presence in Columbus, Ohio, where he is crushing some dreams and selling some stuff:
  

  I’ll be in town Thursday through Saturday at CCAD with some far more gifted friends. There is a panel Thursday night you can sign up for. (it’s lower on the page) I’m bringing a carload of stuff from my store and can be bribed with pounds of locally-roasted coffee.

  You can connect to the event on the Facebooks here. I believe if you just pop your name into the google doc you can go to the panel.

  I’ll be at Laughing Ogre (possibly with special guests) from 1-3pm on Saturday, too!

  The CCAD he mentioned is the Columbus College of Art and Design, where Stevens, C Spike Trotman, Molly Crabapple, and Tanisha Robinson have been letting art students know what awaits them after leaving school, hopefully using the words doom, starvation, and embitterment in the right proportions.

• Following up on the observations of KB Spangler re: Kickstarters ‘tother day, Minna Sundberg shares how a crowdfunding can be monstrously successful and go pretty much according to plan¹ and still be a complete nightmare. Read it carefully.
• Zach Weinersmith is on the cusp of becoming a first-time father, which any reasonable person would expect having an impact on his creative projects. That might explain why Weinersmith released an ebook ten days ago and a second one earlier this week. Twins in Time is a child-aimed picture book told in rhyme about relativistic physics² with longtime collaborator Chris Jones. Look for between one and fifty-three more projects to drop from Weinersmith in the immediate future, depending on when labor starts.
• The Cartoonist Studio Prize, nominations for which were announced a month ago, has been awarded, and the winners are Emily Carroll in the Webcomics category, and Taiyo Matsumoto in the Graphic Novel category; in addition to the acclaim of all, Matsumoto and Carroll each get US$1000, which is a pretty good complement to a fancy plaque.

  As noted when the nominations were released, pretty much everything in the running this year was worthy of recognition, but it’s hard to come up with webcomics better than Carroll’s Out of Skin. We’ll let this discussion of merit and quality take us out; now let’s all get drunk and play ping-pong.

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¹ She received the books a month sooner than expected and just finished shipping; considering the original plan was for shipping to take place in springtime of 2014, I’d say she did pretty damn well.

² Specifically, the so-called twin paradox relating to velocity and time dilation. Perfect for bedtime!

Dentarthurdent, not getting the hang of Thursdays, etc.

See, I was all set to be nice and bloggy today to make up for yesterday¹ and had even started writing when my site decided to not run for a while. It came back (obviously), but it did so without the draft that I’d been working on and a time when work demanded all my attention — a situation that just finished up.

You know what? Mulligan. We’ll try this again tomorrow.

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¹ My jaunt to Portland left me wiped, as it turns out that traveling for 25 hours in order to deliver 16 hours of classroom training is a thing for those hell of younger than me.

Why the heck not? I’ve got an evil twin, I can have a long lost sister.

• Last night I had the pleasure of dining with Dylan Meconis and her wife, Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire. The conversation went far and wide¹, but a recurring theme was why do artists not apply the same fervor that goes into their art to the legal/business aspects of their careers? And how can I help change that? The question never resolved into a neat answer, but in thinking on it since I’m tending in the direction that artists (for the most part) know that this is stuff they’re supposed to care about, but if they don’t have somebody to to help them with ______ ² and don’t know where to get one, the whole issue gets back-burnered like a diet resolution on January third.

  So I’m solving the issue now: Knock that shit off, artists. Your work has value. Your time has value. Insisting that people pay you as agreed doesn’t make you a jerk, it makes you somebody who will meet rent this month. If you don’t know who to talk to, talk to Katie. I don’t have a need for IP or contracts advice, but if I ever did, she is the first person I’d contact and I’d do whatever she told me to³ because she is scary smart and not out to screw me. Yes, that will cost me money, but you know what would cost me more? Getting screwed on the fact that I thought I knew the terms of a contract and didn’t know it as well I’d convinced myself.

  There. Problem solved.

• News! Since the launch of Maker Space a whole day ago, KB “Otter” Spangler has seen the precipice and taken the leap of faith:
  

  I am a full-time Thing-Maker now. I’m not really sure how this happened. I am totally sure it’s all your fault. Yes, you. Thank you for buying my stuff, and for leaving reviews, and for telling your friends about this wacky corner of the Internet. It all adds up, and it is appreciated!

  If you haven’t bought your copy of Maker Space yet, I’ve put a list of links here. I’ll update this page when new formats are made available.

  I am still waiting on a piece of art to do the final Kickstarter update,* so I’ll do that when I receive it.

  See you on Thursday!

  *Since this is the Internet and we all know how the Internet thinks, I should probably mention that my single source of income for the next year will be from sales of Maker Space, not the Kickstarter. Guys, if you walk away from a project-oriented Kickstarter with spending money in your pocket, you are not using Kickstarter correctly.

  I wanted to share this to say two things:

  1. Congrats, Otter, and keep up the good work.
  2. Look at that last part, particularly the last sentence; Otter has summed up the fundamental truth about Kickstarts that everybody looking to get in on the Magic Money Machine needs to have tattooed on the insides of their eyelids.
• Procrastination alert! Jorge Cham is wandering around the UK, apparently alone and up to his own devices. It’s probably too late to point you to the talk at St Andrew’s University as it’s already happened, but the next three days will bring Cham to Warwick University, Cambridge University (where they arguably invented the idea of university), and Queen Mary University (details TBA, check Cham’s events page). If anybody sees Cham and he looks lost, jetlagged, like he might be driving on the wrong side of the road, or perhaps too deep into his cups, make sure he gets pointed in the right direction, yes?

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¹ A discussion about where electric power goes if you don’t have a transmission system? Swoon! I think I fell a little bit in love with Katie, and Dylan very kindly did not brain us both.

² Contracts. Getting paid. IP issues. Fill in the blank as you wish.

³ Which would probably include Talk to this other person who has the more precise expertise or regional locality that will benefit you.

First and foremost, there is a gorgeous blue sky in Portland; the rain and drizzle of the morning burned off into a wonderful day. Neat. Shame I have to leave tomorrow.

• Dropping today: KB “Otter” Spangler’s second novel, Maker Space; it’s the one that you (yes, you) helped to get converted to audiobook and Braille. It’s available in a variety of formats and places:
  

  It’s March 3rd, and that means Maker Space is live! Ebooks only right now; I need to make sure the formatting changes for the Kickstarter character winners have gone through before I release print copies.

  This is the Amazon (US) link for .mobi files. I made sure that DRM is not enabled. International links should be live by Tuesday.

  The AGAHF store has .pdfs.

  At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the files at the Smashwords site to go live. This site has multiple file options for e-readers, and no DRM.

  Disclaimer: I was an earlier reader of both Rachel Peng novels, and Otter is a personal buddy; doesn’t change the fact that they are all kinds of good.

• Dropping today: Tavis Maiden, he of the Beast Aura, had his Kickstart and said that his new comic would launch in March, and here it is March, and here is Tenko King. Check ‘er out.
• Coming Soon: Surviving The World’s Dante Shepherd announced that he’s joining the I Love Charts team, and the I Love Charts Team is joining The Medium (parent site of The Nib):
  

  So, big announcement: I’ll be contributing to the @ilovecharts team over on @Medium with a new comic once a week: https://medium.com/i-love-charts/e6d9ee47ba60 …

  As somebody who firmly believes you can never have too many charts, this is good news.

• Coming Soon: TopatoCo has a new client in The Fullbright Company, maker of last year’s artistic and experimental videogame, Gone Home. I can’t recall TopatoCo partnering with a game company before, but they work with fine artists and educators and public radio producers, so why not a game company, if it matches with the TopatoCo aesthetic? Gone Home gear is available now, with delivery to your grubby little hands likely in the next 10-12 days.
• Coming Soon: The previously-mentioned new webcomic from David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) is expected sometime in April, and Morgan-Mar has specifically shared what the new strip is about:
  

  So if you want to know what my new comic will be about, this is what it’s about: It’s about improving my drawing skills.

  He may be stealing an approach from Scott McCloud, who when asked — over the past few years — what his forthcoming graphic novel is about replied About 400 pages.

But we’re supposed to be about news and webcomics, and a giant bolus of webcomics news hit yesterday in the form of John Campbell’s presumably last Kickstarter update. It’s painful and horrifying to read.

I’ve liked Pictures for Sad Children a lot, but I don’t know John Campbell; I’m pretty sure we briefly met once¹, and we have people in common. Or perhaps we’ve had people in common; reading between the lines on Twitter yesterday, along with conducting a book-burning Campbell has apparently cut ties with just about everybody.

The rambling, makes-sense-if-you-wrote-it … I’m going to call it a manifesto … that Campbell dropped yesterday puts a lot of past behavior into stark relief: the claim to have been faking depression, the systematic removal of comics from the web, a needless shitfight on Tumblr, and a book about a hallucinogen that may or may not be autobiographical.

Like I said, I don’t know Campbell; those that do² have said online that Campbell doesn’t acknowledge inconsistent or worrying behavior, and refuses both contact and assistance. Campbell did some brilliant comics; it’s likely that will not happen any longer, and for reasons that are almost certainly outside Campbell’s control. I’m going choose to remember Campbell not for this turn of events, but for PFSC and the moments of insight and uplift it provided.

And there is nothing else that can be done in this situation but to bear witness, to recognize that this is something that happened, and to hope like hell that this story eventually has a non-tragic outcome.

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¹ As near as I can recall, our interactions were limited to an email exchange around the time of the Mexico Comics Commune of Aught-Seven, and it’s possible Ryan Estrada introduced me when we talked that night before he walked across the border. Honestly, I can’t remember.

² No names; this being the internet, somebody is going to berate them simultaneously for what they did and did not do vis-à-vis Campbell, and they don’t need the grief.

Although there are multiple people in that bonfire video; I can only hope that one of them recognizes that in front of them is somebody that needs help immediately and tries to arrange it. I don’t typically hold people that would burn books for the hell of it to be capable of such rational analysis, but I’m willing to make an exception here if it means Campbell finds safety and care.

Yeah, didn’t think you’d have a problem with that.

• Thing the First: In conjunction with the news about the STRIPPED poster, the Washington Post actually spoke to Bill Watterson about his decision to do the poster.
• Thing the Second: Filmmakers Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have spoken with admiration about how the first Machine of Death collection hit #1 on Amazon for one day, and are trying to pull off the same trick with STRIPPED on iTunes. And heck if it doesn’t look like they might do so:
  

  Guys! You guys! Now @strippedfilm is #7: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/stripped/id816065098?ls=1 … JUSTIN BEIBER IS #15! This is the sweetest plum!

• Thing the Third: The Dave Kellett half of Freddave Kellett-Schroeder was kind enough to answer some questions from me in addition to the first, brief response he gave yesterday. The interview is presented here for your edification:

Fleen thanks Kellett for his time, and we completely believe that what’s in the OSU collection is the original and not a clever duplicate, leaving the actual original in a secret, climate-controlled room at Casa de Kellett. We at Fleen are also totally not planning a way to find into that secret room which clearly does not exist and stare at the original which is not there in a state of rapture until they take us away with tears streaming down our faces. Honest.