Three things coming up, some more immediately than others.

• Jim Zub’s Samurai Jack #5 is out today, and in this issue he brings the first story arc to a close (it’s been great), and gives us a sneak peek towards next month’s issue in a promo ad at the back. Friends, I’ve been sitting on this news since Zub told me in confidence back in October, but now that the issue’s hit the streets, I’m talking. Two words for your pleasure:

  The. Scotsman.

  Oh, hecka yeah. And yeah, this news has appeared elsewhere, but I promised Zub I wouldn’t mention it until something appeared in the comic so there.

• Received in the mail (but not yet read): Box Brown’s forthcoming work of graphic novel biography, Andre the Giant. It’s an uncorrected advance copy so things may change by the time it sees print in May, but I hope that they keep the two front-cover blurbs by Mandy Patinkin and Mick Foley (who, coincidentally, have been two of my very favorite interviews on Fresh Air with Terry Gross). Many thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books, I’m sure that even non-wrestling-watching me is going to love the crap out of this book.
• Howard Tayler¹ never stops thinking, never stops planning, never stops looking for a way to a) tell more stories, and b) preferably get paid at least twice² for doing so. It could hardly have escaped his notice that people want to play around in the sandbox that is the Schlockiverse, and even a boardgame isn’t enough to satisfy them. Thus, a tabletop roleplaying game is in the works, and you (for a small percentage of “you” that are in Utah this weekend) can participate in a playtest for charity:
  

  [Y]ou should note that the Schlock Mercenary RPG session will be on Saturday from noon until 4pm.

  A seat at the table will set you back $25, and that will get you that seat for about four hours of role-playing as a mercenary in the Schlockiverse, with me as the storyteller, and Alan as the referee and “physics engine.” The players will be their own mercenary company, and the contract will be a spot of law-enforcement in which they’ll be encouraged to keep the collateral damage to a minimum.

  Consider, for a moment, what you would expect from a Schlock Mercenary storyline in which Tagon’s Toughs were told to keep collateral damage to a minimum. Now imagine yourself embedded in that scenario, and armed with something that goes “OMMMINOUS HUMMM” when turned on, but which you’ve been instructed not to use under any circumstances.

  The beneficiary of this semi-sanctioned (pretend) mayhem will be Junior Achievement of Utah³, at Epic Puzzles & Games in West Valley City. If you can’t get a seat at the table, Tayler advises that there will probably be observer space as well. Look for the game in question to show up sometime next year.

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¹ Evil twin, almost time for his fake “birthday”, etc.

² In this case, three times, for which I rewarded him with a delicious smoothie.

³ If he were a little more important, perhaps Tayler could have gotten the charity-fundraising gig with Senior Achievement of Utah. Gotta start at the bottom, though.

Still on slow network, but not quite as bad as yesterday. I’ll take it.

• Best reason to get an eBay account if you don’t already have one: the Stan and Sharon Sakai Benefit Auction, launching next week. Watch this space for further information as it become available. Or, you know, just wait until the 6th and search for “sakai benefit auction” on eBay.
• The Bram Stoker Awards, given by the Horror Writers Association, are the premiere recognition that you are writing something seriously spookifying and creeping others the hell out, while also serving as an inducement to always stay personally on the straight and narrow¹. The finalists for the 2013 awards are in, and alongside familiar names such as Stephen King (competing against his son) and Joe Hill (competing against his father), there is the category for Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel, where one may find a series of print efforts, as well as Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo. Okay, granted, he’s nominated for Sin Titulo (Dark Horse Comics), meaning the print edition, but we know it was a webcomic first. Best of luck to Stewart, that Stoker Award would look great next to his Eisner.
• Week to week, it’s even money whether the most thinky comic will come from Randall Munroe or Zach Weinersmith; while the competition may still be open for thinkiest comic, unless Munroe does some real quick publishing Weinersmith won for the thinkiest book by a webcomicker this week. Behold: Polystate: A Thought Experiment in Distributed Government, presently sitting at #5 in Kindle books on the topic of political science.

  I haven’t read Polystate yet (no Kindle, for one thing), but judging from the description I feel confident in reminding Weinersmith that when Stephenson thought up franchulates in Snow Crash he meant them to be all dystopian and satirical, not a model for serious consideration. It’s on your head if society breaks up and devolves into an anarchic, polystatic form, Zach. Yeah, yeah, I know — about to have a new baby in the house, you wouldn’t notice if society collapsed for the next eighteen months or so, but some of us are trying to have a civilization here.

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¹ on the grounds that if you ever do stray and commit some crime, the fact that you thought up something scary enough to win a Brammy will almost certainly be used as evidence at your trial that you are malevolent and spend time thinking about how to harm your neighbors.

Yeah, pictures ain’t happening today.

Okay, not naming any names, but when a major technology company¹ has in-house WiFi that is chugging along at 47.3kbps, I’ma say that you’re not doing a good job as a major technology company. In fact, this has been a sad trend in my career; even two years ago when I visited a client, speedy network was a given; now, it’s a sad crapshoot. This will necessarily be brief.

Etiquette lessons, via Ryan North:

So far this year I have shared a meal with TWO former Olympians entirely by random chance, and in case it happens a third time in as many months I’ve looked up an etiquette thing that I will now share with you. When someone reveals that they’ve competed in the Olympics, are you allowed to say “…Did you win?”

The answer is no!

What you CAN say is “How did you do?” or “What was it like?” or “Wowowowow” but you should leave it to them to tell you if they won a medal. So now we’re all ready to dine with elite-level athletes. (For the first one when he said he was in the Olympics I just said “Oh that must have been really really neat” and so if you want to share a meal with someone who sounds like he’s touched in the head, I’m available.)

Worth mentioning again, and it comes from one of my favoritest creators, Magnolia Porter:

Hello friends! Some of you have asked me to give slightly more notice about what cons I will be attending this year, so I’ll let you know right now that the next time you can see me in person will be at MoCCA in New York, April 5 & 6. I will be sharing my table with Tom Siddell so come on down if you want to meet us! I’ll mention MoCCA again when it’s a little closer to the date, but there you go.

Did you catch it? The almost-in-passing reference to Gunnerkrigg Court creator Tom Siddell splitting table space with Monster Pulse creator Porter. We knew that Siddell was coming to New York in the spring, but being reminded six weeks out instead of five months out does make it easier to keep track of. Hooray for the table with possibly the highest concentration of well-written teen characters.

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¹ You are disappointing me, client.

Quick programming note before we get started — I’ll be on site with a client for work at the start of next week, with the quality of connectivity unknown at this time. There may be late updates.

• On the value of revisiting old work, Part The First: John Allison often takes a break to tell a side-story in between the arcs of Bad Machinery, though rarely as long as the 10 weeks since The Case of the Forked Road wrapped up. Allison scoffed at the notion of taking off for year-end holidays, and quickly settled into a seven-strips-a-week jaunt back to the days of Bobbins, a run which has seen a house blown up, a child wracked with guilt, Tim chased out of a second country, the return of a long-absent character, the rekindling of a long-ago relationship, and a birth under trying circumstances.

  Even better, revisiting old characters sometimes leads to a recharge of the creative batteries; Allison is ready to dive back into Bad Machinery, and with a vengeance:

  This run of Bobbins ends on Saturday. I couldn’t have imagined that something I re-started just because it made me laugh would have proved so popular. It’s really reminded me of the joy of daily cartooning and why I started all those years ago. I’ll be archiving all the pages from this run on the new Bobbins site, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t return to these characters another time. I’m sure I’ll do the odd strip from time to time prior to a longer run when the schedule allows/demands it.

  That means Bad Machinery returns on Sunday with The Case Of The Modern Men. I’ll continue to run strips seven days a week, and see how that works out. I think you’ll like this story, it kind of gets back to what I’m about. [emphasis added]

  That gives Tim one day to patch things up with Riley, get back to inventing with Scout, Erin and The Boy to decide where they are … Allison will pretty much have to revisit Bobbins to deal with all these stories waiting to be told. In the meantime, though — Lottie and Shauna and Mildred and Sonny and Linton and Jack await, and that’s always a good thing.

• On the value of revisiting old work, Part The Second: It’s been a long damn time since Mac Hall wrapped up, a comic which will never let you think of sad girls and snow the same way again. It’s been a long damn time since creators Ian McConville and Matt Boyd shifted their concentration to Three Panel Soul, a concentration that has been interspersed on occasion with other concerns. So it’s maybe not surprising that in all that time, the original Mac Hall print collection (200o to 2002!) had disappeared into the aether, as the aether is where it’s returned to. Ten bucks on Gumroad, for your immediate gratification.
• On the value of your work, period: Dean Trippe wrote something on the Something Terrible Kickstarter page that struck me, about two stories that have recently been related to him. He’s made no secret of how making ST was therapeutic for him, but now he’s hearing about the value it has had — or could have had — for others:
  

  Right now, I’m in tears because of two stories I got this week. One from someone who reads Something Terrible every day to help them through the darkness, and another about someone who left us shortly before I’d figured out how to tell this story, someone who died never knowing there wasn’t a secret monster lurking inside.

  To those of you who came here because of my story, thank you. My next projects will be fictional, all-ages, colorful, and fun. But I know that you all understand why stories like that matter to us. Because we shared Something Terrible.

  Thank you for making my lifelong dream of using comics to help people come true somehow. It almost doesn’t make sense. But here we are. So let’s keep going. Together.

  Since Something Terrible released, I’ve thought about it in terms of people who need to read it, and sadly it doesn’t appear as if that need will ever go away. Share it, share it widely, get this story to as many people as possible and hopefully those that need it will be among them.

Don’t worry, we’re talking about the good kind of trailer today, the kind that doesn’t give away every good joke and scene, and makes you more anxious to see something instead of feeling like you’ve already seen everything worth seeing. Promise.

• This page has not been shy about the general awesomeness of people that occupy my voluntary tribal affiliation, the Engineers¹; there are a surprisingly large number of engineer-cartoonists in webcomicdom, particularly given the relative stealthiness of engineers in society² compared to other careers and professions.

  What can I say? They don’t make exciting and/or sexy TV shows about my mathematically-inclined, winging-it brethren. This may well be because we aren’t really very good at explaining what we do³, beyond it’s very complicated and it would take too long so don’t worry. Which may go a long way to explaining why my very favorite engineer-cartoonist is the one that does the most to demystify the ways of my people; while never dismissing the hard work and lifelong study that are the hallmarks of engineering, Angela Melick also shows the sheer delight of making something awesome.

  The latest chronicles of Melick’s life as an engineer (and just as importantly, life beyond engineering) is rapidly approaching, and she has graced us with a book trailer for Cubicle Warrior, the third collection of Wasted Talent. Be ready come March to order the crap out of what will be the best collection yet of the best webcomic dealing with engineering, life, change, Canadianess, and the best stuff in life. Nothing will exceed it until the fourth collection of Wasted Talent, because that’s when we’ll get swords.

• I have watched the trailer for STRIPPED more times than I can count. I am full of anticipation for the final film, and have tried to be patient, lo these long months since an ever-optimistic FredDave Kellett-Schroeder thought that they could have the film wrapped and Kickstarter rewards delivered by January 2012, or at least December 2013. Nobody could have known how many outside limiting factors would delay the production of STRIPPED (not the least being licensing and legal clearances from copyright holders), but for a while now the progress on releasing movie has been dependent upon literally the richest corporation in the world. Thus, these tweets yesterday:
  

  Hooray! Good news from iTunes, today, means good news is coming shortly for 5,000 Kickstarter backers. Just sayinnnnnnnn’.

  Kickstarter backers! @strippedfilm email went out asking for your info to send rewards! If you have probs/questions: dave@davekellett.com :)

  I have a feeling that I am shortly going to be toasting Freddave, and Jen and Ben, and everybody else in the production of STRIPPED with a very generous pour of very good scotch⁴. I’ve known in my heart for a long time that y’all have done good; now’s just when we finally get to see it.

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¹ Right-hand rule represent.

² I speak here of actual engineers, those that are trained, examined, eligible for licensing, and have drummed into them the idea that what they do matters because lives and safety depend on doing their work right.

Anybody that mentions fake “engineering” fancifications designed to make a crappy job sound more appealing will be beaten.

³ My preferred elevator pitch is Engineers bend the laws of nature and math to practical use. If it stands up instead of falling down, goes where it’s supposed to instead of stopping, turns on instead of powering down, or generally works instead of breaking, then engineers designed the interesting bits.

⁴ I have it on good authority that that Kellett half of Freddave Kellett-Schroeder will be celebrating with a delightful wine cooler.

I like those days with lots of random things instead of one big story — it’s pretty much a promise that something in the news will appeal to you.

• I spoke to you of Ursula Vernon and the SWFA contretemps last week; there’s an aftermath that caught my eye yesterday. Namely, more Ursula Vernon arty goodness. Honestly, people that scream loudly about the moving of the tide can scream themselves silly if it means I get more Ursula Vernon drawings; I’m not sure how, but she makes chitinous, six-legged, antennaed things from the far side of the Valley of Not Like Us almost cuddly.
• I’ve mentioned, from time to time, Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar’s Al’Rashad; I like its scope, its approach to page-at-a-time storytelling, the show-don’t-tell worldbuilding, not to mention sharp writing and gorgeous art. Bird’s story feels like it’s coming into the endgame, but it’s not quite there yet; it’s a bit early to be doing post-mortems and analytic looks back, but he has taken the time to share his experiences in trying to build up readership via Project Wonderful ads. The campaign started some two weeks ago (around this page), so Bird’s got enough data to say adverts = readership bump and which were most effective.
• New Delilah Dirk story:
  

  DELILAH DIRK AND THE SEEDS OF GOOD FORTUNE: a self-contained tale of adventure, now available as a digital download! https://gum.co/dd-seeds

  Creator Tony Cliff doesn’t say in that tweet (darn those 140 character limits), but The Seeds of Good Fortune is pay what you want, noting:

  At a loss for how much to contribute? Most Marvel/DC digital comics are $0.99. The print edition of Seeds was $6.00 plus shipping. If in doubt, why not split the difference?

  That would be three and a half bucks, by the way. Pretty fair price for 36 pages.

• New Diesel Sweeties collection [no permalink]:
  

  Victory! My second Oni Press book, “Bacon is a Vegetable; Coffee is a Vitamin” is out today. I’ve got them a day early in my store. I’m doing paperbacks for just $15 this week so you can upgrade to a personalized version and still only pay normal price.*

  *Or just save money. It’s Wizard Magic.®

  Only Bacon Wizards and Coffee Warlocks are authorized to click this link. By clicking this link, you certify that you are a Bacon Wizard or Coffee Warlock under penalty of Space Law.

  Listen to the man, you do not want to run afoul of Space Law.

• New Christopher Hastings comic book:
  

  Tumblr, I wrote this comic for you.

  DEADPOOL ANNUAL #2, MAY 2014

  CHRISTOPHER HASTINGS (w) • JACOPO CAMAGNI (a)
  Cover by DAVID NAKAYAMA
  • Hang on…is that Deadpool or Spider-Man? YES.
  • Deadpool “helps out” his “friend” Spider-Man by donning his webs!
  • Think Spidey will appreciate it?
  40 PGS./ ONE-SHOT/Rated T+ …$4.99

  Hastings is fast becoming the go-to guy at Marvel for goofball characters and stories that are actually fun. Given the increasing visibility (tolerance?) for such projects at the Big M, I hope this means more work for Hastings. A lot more work, because I enjoy the crap out of it.

But first: Happy 5000 Strips Day to my evil twin. Also, does somebody who knows Wikipedia want to update Howard’s bio to reflect that he’s my evil twin? That would be awesome.

• Not so long ago I was musing on people that Kickstart new comics and don’t deliver and I was thinking to myself Tavis is due to launch in March; I bet he’s all over that deadline. Tavis being Tavis Maiden, whom I had the opportunity to talk to at length last summer, about his Kickstarter to launch a new comic, and why would it take him six months anyway? In a word, infrastructure, and he was quite clear that Tenko King would be launching in March. Well, whaddaya know:
  

  Tenko King is coming in two weeks.

  Short, clear, to the point, and two weeks from yesterday would be … 3 March, the very earliest he could launch in March on a weekday. The lesson here being, do not doubt Tavis.

• David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) is one of those guys I will never stop following online; his comics (of which Irregular Webcomic is just one) are variously funny, inventive, and/or feature interesting technological hooks. His philosophical treatises on science and the world around us are enlightening. And he’s going to be launching a new project, soon:
  

  I have a new webcomic idea which I plan to work on and launch some time in the next few weeks. It will be wholly produced by me (as opposed to produced with co-authors like Darths & Droids, or soliciting reader contributions like Square Root of Minus Garfield).

  Stay tuned.

  Next few weeks? Sounds like it could be March. I’ll be over here, perched on these tenterhooks.

• In March of last year the internet saw fit to give three quarters of a million dollars to the creators of Cyanide and Happiness for the purposes of cornering the market on hookers and smack making an internet-based show, since attempts to do an actual broadcast-type show would have resulted in a whole bunch of people who were not the creators of Cyanide and Happiness taking ownership of various degrees of Cyanide and Happiness.

  Screw that noise, I can imagine Dave, Kris, Matt, and Rob saying to themselves. Now, a show (even one on the internet) is considerably more complex to put together than an webcomic, but a year’s production time for such an undertaking is practically warp speed. Progress is being made, reports Rob DenBleyker on behalf of The C&H Show team [audio, video, possibly not safe for your workplace], with a launch later this year. You know what’s later this year? March. Just sayin’.

Noted by the inimitable (and very sexy) R Stevens on Twitter: Team USA skier Ted Ligety competes with Red Robot #C-63 (created by Sam Brown, but perhaps most closely associated with Stevens) on his helmet. While it makes perfect sense that Ligety would want to CRUSH his competition, I think that there may be another reason — Red Robot physically resembles the gates that he must slalom through.

Clearly the gates are themselves designed to CRUSH all in their vicinity, and Red Robot’s presence acts as a sort of guarantee of safe passage. Although Ligety didn’t medal in the super combined¹, I’d say coming through the runs without being CRUSHed is a pretty good consolation.

• Looking forward: Dean Trippe will be doing the first of undoubtedly many con panels on his astonishingly good Something Terrible at Emerald City Comic Con next month. Specifically, it will be in Hall D, 4:40pm, Friday 28 March, and it will be moderated by Kate Leth. Programming and floor map haven’t been released for ECCC yet, so there could be some changes still; let’s hope that Hall D, wherever it is, is nice and large.
• Looking at numbers: Almost nobody² shares more data about how he’s doing in comics more often than Jim Zub (perhaps Ryan Estrada); really, the only difference is in detail, as Zub tends to scrub numbers but keep trends visible, and Estrada shares actual dollars and cents. Thus it is in his latest share, this time about submitting to comiXology and how the money breaks down from doing so.

  The big conclusion I took away from Estrada’s tale of submitting (and getting rejected more than accepted) to comiXology? Apple is the big winner, taking more than 25% of the proceeds while not being responsible for either the act of creation nor the curatorial/editorial efforts. Good for Apple — I hear they could use a few bucks. Sarcasm aside, there’s money to be made in the infrastructure end of content industries; the only question is if economies of scale will permit anybody to ever take crumbs away from Apple’s table.

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¹ One part KILL ALL HU-MANS, one part kitty care.

² One should note that nobody in comics comes close to Dorothy Gambrell when it comes to detailed data sharing, but she didn’t have a data dump today.

Done with snow, done with slush, done with packed ice from the plow at the end of my driveway, done. Done, done, done. Two more inches of snow tomorrow? It had better be the last of the season or me and Mother Nature are going to throw down.

Yet always is the winter of discontent made glorious summer by the sun of webcomics, by which I naturally mean Brad Guigar¹. Take ‘er away, Brad:

Today marks 14 years of my doing a daily comic strip on the Web — and the beginning of the second full year since I left my day job to fulfill my lifelong goal of being a full-time professional cartoonist.

We all know what this means: Brad is one of the good guys, one who’s always there to share knowledge and hard-won wisdom, so I expect that you will all be there for him in two years when his webcomicking career turns 16 and gets its driving license and stays out all night causing poor Brad endless worry. It’s only right.

Kickstarter update time!

• It’s been two and a half weeks, roughly, since Jesse Thorn’s Make Your Thing campaign launched, and it’s not looking too likely. It’s stalled at about the 20% mark with a bit less than eleven days to go to make its US$120,000 goal. The idea behind the conference is entirely laudable, and I hope that Thorn, et. al., find a way to make it work even without funding up front; if nothing else, they’ve learned that there’s a scope-and-scale disconnect between what they want to do and what people are willing to participate in.
• In better news, Tony Breed is, as I write this, on the verge of meeting goal for the fourth collection of Finn & Charlie Are Hitched … like eleven dollars away from the very modest US$3800 goal, also with a bit less than eleven days to go. Be the person to put him over goal and we can see how the stretch goal(s) will make the books nicer. Do it just because this book is dedicated to the very concept that the very wise Lore Sjöberg noted are the three most wonderful words in the English language: I’m somebody’s fetish.
• Two days in, about 20% of the way there — Great Adaptations will be a children’s book about evolution, with contributions from the likes of Rosemary Mosco, Yuko Ota, Zach Weinersmith², and JN Wiedle (plus a bunch of scientists that — let’s face it — you wouldn’t recognize by name). It’s a very neat project, and I’m a little surprised that it’s only sitting at about 150 backers, with the limited rewards at the higher tiers mostly unclaimed. Let’s get the word out on this one — little Ada Weinersmith needs good books to be read to her when she arrives, and this is our chance to help make that happen.

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¹ Ladies.

² Illustrating a story called The Mystery of the Vanishing Killifish, which just happens to be the subject of a doctoral dissertation by Kelly Weinersmith, who is coincidentally married to Zach Weinersmith, the two of whom are in the end stages of a possibly-illegal cloning experiment.

(Ho as in the sense of Yukon Ho!, not in the sense of insulting somebody as a ho.)

So David Willis made him some porns last month, and it was a huge¹ success, prompting more porns. The sequel to Walky Performs A Sex goes up on Slipshine at midnight tonight, or the moment that it becomes Valentine’s Day because Willis is nothing if not romantic. As before, access to the porns will be via Slipshine subscription; it will not be available for individual purchase.

Over the last few hours there have been some discussions and backs-and-forths regarding the name of the latest porns, with the original title — My Lesbian or Dongs? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Dongs having come in for … I’m not sure if I’d call it criticism, actually. More discussion as to whether or not the confluence of the ideas lesbian and no dongs was exclusionary towards lesbians that have dongs. Willis being Willis, I’m certain that it’s merely a matter of time before his comment threads are besieged by those that feel that merely entertaining a discussion on the issue is somehow giving in to those who would censor/demand political correctness/aarrghglghblblargh!!².

Consensus on the issue was not to be found, and Willis changed the title — not, I’m pretty sure, because of pressure, but to clarify his intentions. Namely, if it’s possible to not cause concern to any potential readers and still work in a sweet Back to the Future reference in the title, isn’t that the more generous approach to all concerned³? So it was, and I don’t think the humor is the worse for it.

The lesson here is not to change the substance of your work in response to complaints; that’s a really good way to never produce work that satisfies anybody. It’s to apply an editorial eye to your own work, and make careful decisions as to whether or not your work is conveying the message you wanted it to convey. Yes, the act of creating (or in some cases, existing) is going to enrage some people almost autonomically, there’s not much we can do there … but when somebody produces a polite observation that the story (title, character, whatever) might not be taken the way you thought? That’s worthy of some additional thought, and it’s no different than any other circumstance where you might be called upon to kill your darlings.

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¹ So to speak.

² Honestly, it’s like he breeds them in a special facility or something.

³ Except for those who are going to be dicks toward Willis regardless.