Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight: ShiftyLook is a subsidiary of Bandai Namco, which through predecessor companies and associated firms, has a deep catalog of videogames going back a few decades. The purpose of ShiftyLook has been to find new ways to use the IP associated with those old games, which they’ve done by starting up webcomics, webtoons, and a multiplayer large visual novel-type game. That’s pretty much everything they could be doing, right?

Wrong.

Jim Zub (well known to readers of this page) has been pretty involved in the development of the ShiftyLook comics (writing, scouting talent, etc), and one of his comics projects, Wonder Momo, is about to square the circle that is Momo’s Wonder-Hoop.

Having originated as an arcade side-scroller, Zub, co-author Erik Ko, and artist Omar Dogan (all of whom are part of UDON Entertainment) turned it into the story of a wannabe idol singer with lots of over-the-top Power Ranger-type action¹. Now Bandai Namco are turning the new story based on the old game into an anime miniseries, with a videogame to follow. So that’s a game based on an anime based on a webcomic based on an arcade game. Opined Mr Zub on Twitter:

Bandai-Namco made a Wonder Momo anime based on the comic strip story I wrote! Unveiled in Japan just now! @ShiftyLook

And there’s a new Wonder Momo video game also in development based on our comic story. Absolutely surreal.

For a little more context as to what this means to Zub, check out his history with anime, and what this would have meant to his 15 year old self.

Wonder Momo (the anime series) will stream as five, 5-minute episodes on Crunchyroll on Thursdays at 7:30pm (presumably EST), starting in February. Wonder Momo (the game) is under development for PC and Android. Jim Zub (the architect of Momo’s revival) probably took about half an hour to feel justifiably proud, then got back to work because that’s the kind of guy he is.

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¹ And, given that the protagonist, the frenemy and the protagonist’s mom are all magical girls with transformation sequences and battle suits that don’t feature pants, surprisingly tame and tasteful fan service. Heck, the original arcade game featured a perv with a camera distracting Momo with upskirt attempts; Zub’s repurposed him into a legit photojournalist.

Anybody reading this on the other side of the Atlantic from me? Or just immensely wealthy? Some things to keep an eye out for.

• Firstly, the annual Festival de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême is getting ready to kick off again, and while my high school French is a little rusty, I’m pretty sure that it starts on Thursday (30 January) and runs until Sunday (Saint Groundhog’s Day). There’s literally no way for me to look for all the names that might be there — Angoulême is enormous, with more than 200,000 attendees each year, and 6000 to 7000 pros there to meet them.

  It adds up to more than five times the population of the host city, and takes over much of the public space. To put this in scale, for San Diego Comic Con to be as large in absolute terms, it would have to roughly double attendance; for it to be as large in relative terms, some five million people would have to descend on the city.

  Doing a quick scan of the creator present (okay, I cheated and used the English site; creators listed along with publisher/booth-owner name, which will give you locations here), one finds indy-, euro-, and web-comickers like Derf Backderf, Frank Santoro, and Dash Shaw (with Ca Et La), Scott Campbell (with Cambourakis), Boulet and Lewis Trondheim (with Delacourt Delcourt [per Pierre’s correction in the comments; merci, M Lebeaupin]), Alison Bechdel and Joost Swarte (with Denoel Graphic), Alec Longstreth(with L’Employe du Moi — Belgique Wallonie Bruxelle), Bannister (with Glenat), Ben Hatke and Mo Willems (with Rue de Sèvres), and literally thousands more whose names I missed or whose work I’m not familiar with.

  Scott Campbell, by the way, will be there to promote and sign Les Grands Duels du Cinéma, which activity he will continue in Paris from Tuesday the 4th to Sunday the 9th at various venues.

• As long as we’re in France, let’s move up the Channel a bit until we come to Belgium, and Ghent (I loved visiting Ghent, particularly the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb at St Bavo’s Cathedral¹ and the fortress known as The Gravensteen²), where local animation studio GridFX is making a number of interesting projects. But lots of medium-sized cities have local animation studios, and lots of them are making interesting projects (even if few of those interesting projects have the cachet of, say, The Triplets of Belleville).

  GridFX caught my eye because partway down the story — almost in passing — was a bit that mentioned they were the studio that snagged Michel Gagné’s The Saga of Rex, as presented in a half-dozen installments over the run of Flight. Gagné will be directing himself, which will probably turn out pretty damn well considering he’s directed four shorts, and has an extensive resume including some of the best animated films of the past two decades³. Here’s hoping that when Rex is done, it will be seen in more than the occasional arthouse.

• Finally, let’s finish across the icy North Sea, where it appears that the Machine of Death co-editors have been sidelining as Norwegian contract killers. Because that’s normal.

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¹ I am possibly the least religious person you will ever meet, and this painting damn near made me believe in the whole High Church, early Renaissance conception of God and Christ and all their saints. It’s that transcendent, and all I could think looking upon it was Human hands made this, somehow.

² Designed by a Spanish king to establish his claim to Ghent specifically by looking as menacing as possible. From the row of guildhalls on the opposite side of the canal, it looks like the backdrop for a death metal music video, even in bright sunlight.

But then you look behind you at those guildhalls, and the cafes and bars and people enjoying a damn good beer and you think Okay, you can be badass all you want on that side of the water; we’re good over here. What I am saying is along with Bruges and Antwerp, I love the crap out of Ghent and find it a wonderful place to be.

³ Visual effects animation: The Iron Giant; animation on the tasting sequence: Ratatouille; special effects consultant: The Incredibles; development artist: Brave. For those that look back on them fondly, there’s also credits on Space Jam and Star Wars: Clone Wars, but I never saw them.

I was already going to be writing about Kickstarter campaigns when Scott Kurtz made a damn good observation on Twitter:

It’s interesting to follow “pay me to make a webcomic” Kickstarter campaigns, and 6 months to a year later, see who actually DID anything.

The first thought I had was Man, Scott’s very possibly talking about personal friends and acquaintances in that statement; I hope they don’t get mad at him. My second thought was, No, actually, I hope they’re smart enough to take his observation to heart. I suppose that’s why when I have (rarely) backed a Kickstarter that’s designed to launch a comic; I’m always looking for something concrete up front (which, if I get it, tends to bode well for an actually-regular webcomic).

The Last Halloween? I got some pins and a recipe for Sadness Brownies¹. Sufficiently Remarkable? Digital goods, including an audio recording of creator Maki Naro telling a terrible joke. Those were all I convinced myself I was ever going to get, and not only did I get them, but both comics are updating according to schedule, pretty much².

Others … haven’t done so well, either at launching at the promised time³, or at keeping updates coming; I really don’t want to get into names, mostly because for any that I might mention, there were probably three others that weren’t even on my radar. Not that I have much reason to complain about campaigns that I didn’t back (I’ve cut waaaay back on my Kickstarter habit in the past few months), but it’s something to always keep in the back of your mind — Does this project owner convince me that he or she will be able to get/keep their act together?

Let’s talk about some Kickstarts that I have confidence will be made good on in a timely fashion, then:

• Update! Dean Trippe’s magnificent, haunting, win-all-the-awards Something Terrible has six days to go; it’s a little under US$35,000 (of a US$6400 goal) at this writing, and closing in on the US$36K stretch goal of an added epilogue and fancier book design. He’s dead in the middle of the Fleen Predicted Total, but I would be happy to have underestimated this one.
• Update! My buddy Otter’s wonderful, funny, tense novels-to-audiobooks project is over goal, approaching the stretch goal where we can get the audiobooks on a cool USB drive, and pushing towards the stretch goal where Braille conversions (and donations to libraries serving the visually-impaired) happen. It’d be cool to get bonus stories and challenge coins but let’s get that Braille conversion done, yeah? Little more than three weeks for that to happen.
• New Kickstarter! Jesse Thorn, impressario of the Maximum Fun empire, wants to have a conference of independent creators in LA later this year, and that’s going to cost some US$120,000. Aside from the fact that Thorn’s various podcasts have given props to webcomics on numerous occasions (and that MaxFun’s merch is handled by TopatoCo), one of the keynote speakers at the Make Your Thing conference (for that is its name) will be webcomics own Kate Beaton. She may be branching out into other areas of creativity, but comics about history and literature and her younger self will always be where she started.

  And crap, look at the other people gonna be there: Jay Allison, Jane Espenson, Chris Gethard, Merlin Mann, Vernon Reid (!), and John Vanderslice were just the names that jumped out at me the most. Word is trickling out, which is why MYT is currently sitting at 2% of goal, with a predicted finish around 65%, but we’re only three hours in and I hope to see that much higher by this time tomorrow.

  This one deserves some traction, but I fear that the relatively high price points for the campaign — US$25: stickers, thank you email, update announcements; US$100: add video access to the conference and a t-shirt; US$400: add a ticket to the conference and gift bag — are going to be a sticking point. For a three-day professional-type conference US$400 is actually pretty realistic, but how many small-scale creators are going to be able to drop four hundo (plus travel expenses)? I hope this one makes goal, but ask me again in a couple days if it will.

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¹ Which might be the bestest brownies I’ve ever had. Well done, TLH creator Abby Howard!

² Within experimental error, given year-end family obligations, technical issues, etc.

³ Granted, Kickstarter has a long and hallowed history of things not happening when they were supposed to, but there’s a lot less lead time involved in getting a website up and running, even a rudimentary one and getting stuff made by vendors on the other side of the world then shipped to me so I can ship it to you (even before you encounter completely unpredictable events like ships turning back when partway across the Pacific).

Sometimes,you just need something that was amazing and hasn’t been seen for a while to be public and prominent again.

• I don’t believe that I have written on this page before about a trip I took to Belgium and Holland maybe … fifteen years ago? Sounds about right. While in Brussels, my wife and I visited the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, and in and around all the Hergé exhibits (the whole town is a celebration of Tintin), and the other great Eurocomics (around the corner from my hotel was a mural of Blake et Mortimer that took up the entire side of a building¹), was one small piece of art that was clearly the centerpiece of the entire museum.

  Gertie.

  One precious, thin to the point of near-transparency original image (not even a “cel”, as this predated the use of celluloid for animation) from Gertie the Dinosaur, drawn by Winsor McCay nearly a century earlier. Much of what we recognize as comics, and maybe the entire idea of animation, derives from McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur. Heck, it’s a marvel that any of the film still exists, given how little of the silent film era was preserved. But Gertie has never been entirely forgotten, and she’s getting her due courtesy of The Toonseum for her one hundredth birthday:

  Gertie toured the vaudeville circuit in 1914 along with creator Winsor McCay in a unique show combining a live on stage performance and animation. The show wowed audiences, and left them bewildered at what was dubbed one of the great wonders! That vaudeville circuit would have brought both McCay and Gertie to one of Pittsburgh’s many theaters. Now almost 100 years later Gertie returns to Pittsburgh.

  On February 8th, kids can come watch Gertie in action on the screen again and learn about the world’s first of film’s dazzling dinosaurs. Gertie will also be showing off some of her classic cartoon friends on screen as the ToonSeum kicks off our year-long Century of Animation.

  Gertie screens at 1:15pm, followed by quick classes in cartooning and flip-book making, and the dinosaur part also gets its due attention:

  In addition you can explore Gertie’s dinosaur friends including T-rex, Apatosaurus, Velociraptor, and many more from Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Enjoy activities such as measuring teeth and claws, dino foot print stamping, and much more.

  The Carnegie Natural History Center’s Dippy the Dinosaur will be celebrating his 150th Birthday later this year, so look for other events with Gertie and Dippy coming up soon. (It has long been rumored that Dippy and Gertie are an item!) The event runs from 1pm-3:30pm on February 8th at 1pm at the ToonSeum. The cost is $8.00 per child (general admission) and $3.00 per child (members). Adults are free.

  Personally, I think that Gertie might be related to Professor Science, and the velociraptor mentioned may actually be Utahraptor going incognito; naturally, there is only one T-Rex.

• You know what kinda looks like a dinosaur, but not really, but kind of? Jellaby. Okay, J’s a monster, what with the tiny little horns and wings and all, but work with me here. Because this lets me keep to the theme of welcome returns and the subtheme of dinosaurs and announce that after too long a time out of print, Jellaby volume 1 is coming back:
  

  OMG you guys! JELLABY v.1 is coming back into print! This is awesome news! Yay @CapstoneConnect & @keansoo!!! -kjc

  At least in Canada? Amazon’s US site doesn’t recognize the book, but their Canadian site claims it released last week, even though it appears to not be releasing until March? Look, it’s got a new subtitle, a new cover, and a new foreword by Kazu Kibuishi, so find every kid that you know and get them a copy (even if you have to import it from Our Friends To The North) because Jellaby is great.

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¹ I gather that there is more than one in Brussels.

Well! That was a fun couple of days, including two separate airports that just did not want me to leave their premises and threw every possible obstacle in my way. Now let’s never speak of the last 48 hours again.

• Catching up! My buddy Otter — or more properly, KB “Otter” Spangler — of A Girl And Her Fed has launched her first Kickstarter campaign, to take her first novel (released last year) and her next novel (to be released in about six weeks) recorded as audiobooks. On casual inspection this would seem an odd project, since wouldn’t you just make that a stretch goal of the Kickstarter for the books themselves?

  In this case, no, because a) the books weren’t Kickstarted, they were just released on her own; and b) the protagonist of Digital Divide and Maker Space is blind, and releasing them as audiobooks is outreach to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect to a relatable character. In fact, one of the stretch goals will be to convert the books to Braille and donate copies to libraries that serve the visually impaired, so this is maybe less about help me make a cool thing and more about help me extend this cool thing to people who tend not to get as many cool things in a form they can access.

  We’re not quite 48 hours in (like, 12 minutes shy of 48 hours as I write this) and we’re sitting around 95% of goal; per the venerable F^3 calculation, this project should finish up somewhere between 200% and 400% of its modest US$7000 goal. Go support it, and enjoy the project video, which is a puppet show¹.

• Catching up! Some new comics launching over at ShiftyLook, with some veteran creators taking a whack at videogame characters that have … shall we say thin? … plots. Shannon Campbell and Sam Logan are breathing life into Tower of Babel, which is essentially a Jenga-in-reverse puzzler/platformer. Meanwhile Team Nice Wizard (aka Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, and Anthony Clark) are fleshing out the story of Dig Dug.
• Catching up! Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics started as a limited-duration project to publish comics for a year. Then it became an ongoing imprint. Brown himself spent a lot of time working up André the Giant² for much of the past two years, but as that project’s all done but the shipping at this point, he’s back to his publisher role with a vengeance:
  

  After only publishing 7 books in 2013, we ARE BACK to a 12-comics-a-year schedule! In 2014 we’ll be releasing comics from these HOT comics artists!

  Which you can click through to see; I just wanted to stress that this is not a funding announcement, this is an availability-of-subscriptions announcement. These comics are getting published, the only questions are how many, and will you get them or not.

Whew, I think that’s everything I needed to get caught up on. Fortunately, nothing going on in comics today except for the surprise announcement that Scott McCloud is an android. Reached for comment, McCloud responded Of course not, I am a completely alive human, beep, null set. You heard it here first.

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¹ No sign of Spinal Tap, who presumably made off with the audio equipment for the puppet show as the sound levels are bit low. You’ll want to bring the volume up on your computer for all the puppety goodness.

² No lie, this looks to be premier work of André the Giant scholarship; I’m not into professional wrestling³, but like everybody, I know (and have a fond spot for) André the Giant.

³ By which I mean I had a brief period of watching in late junior high school. If I understand my wrestling history right, this was when what is now the WWE was moving from a mostly Northeast base into a wider national profile, pre-Hulkamania. Anyway, my knowledge of pro wrestling is from 30+ years ago, aside from some bored Saturdays watching GLOW⁴ in college.

⁴ That would be the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, because come on, watching Amy the Farmer’s Daughter getting beat down by Matilda the Hun until her [Amy’s] little brother Timmy pulls himself from his hospital bed and makes his way ringside on crutches to inspire her [again, Amy] to defeat her evil rival? That’s gold, from the time of two-reel 1930s melodramas⁵ to the first epic battle between Morimoto and Flay on Iron Chef. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the kid cheering on Morimoto actually was named Timmy!

⁵ By the way, I experimented with the construction 1930s two-reel melodramas before rewriting. I heard on the radio last week (or maybe it was an episode of Judge John Hodgman that there are certain rules of grammar that aren’t taught, but which we instinctively absorb; for instance, you wouldn’t say the red big car instead of the big red car. If anybody knows the name for this phenomenon, I’d love to hear it. Ryan North, I’m looking at you.

Footnotes, everybody!

In lieu of … well, everything, really … please enjoy a new episode of Overcompensating because damn. More Jeffrey Rowland comics (even just one) is exactly what I needed today.

Re: yesterday’s speculation if we’d see more mainstream creators doing extracurricular in-canon naughties, the answer appears to be yes.

“Walky Performs a Sex” did so amazingly well that Slipshine wants another one in a few months. So it’s gonna happen again!

I’m thinking of doing a Shortpacked!-based one this time around, as Dumbing of Age isn’t really full of currently-bangin’ couples at the moment. You can now start yelling at me really loudly to do Amber/Mike, Robin/Leslie, or Ethan/RandyMilholland’sDoppelganger or Ethan/DramafreeMcWhatshisname. You can, but I won’t promise I’ll listen. The heartdick wants what it wants.

In other news, it’s Goblin Week.

In other-other news, I will be attempting later today to fly home into a Winter Storm Warning. Fun!

This is phone-submitted, so no pics. Heck, given the topic today, probably wouldn’t have been anyway.

I’m assuming that tout de webcomics now knows that David Willis followed up his one-year advance notice of discontinuing Shortpacked! with the only thing he possibly could, hardcore pornography. I may have buried the lede there a little.

Okay, in his latest Kickstarter, Willis opened the idea of drawing uncensored sexytimes, and with the Walky/Dorothy storyline progressing as it was, it seemed a good time to get those crazy kids all naked together. Thus, he (on short notice) announced that Slipshine would be hosting Walky Performs A Sex¹, a 17-page in-canon (but outside regular storyline) on-getting-it.

Hosting on Slipshine means revenue, especially since Slipshine doesn’t do per-item charges; the lowest amount of money you can give Slipshine if you’re not already subscribing is US$24.95 for one month, so the only question was how many new subscribers would Willis drive to the site? Three hours before the 10:00pm EST Sunday launch, the answer was 100:

Slipshine got 100 subscriptions in 1 day for the first time in its history! Thanks Dumbing of Age fans. Thumbing of Age fans.

Really respectable numbers, especially considering it was a record signup rate. Naturally, they continued to sign up after the launch:

huuh if we get 10 more subscriptions in the next half hour that’ll be 200 for the day. #howaboutthat

Spoiler alert, they did:

12am CST final tally: 208… thanks everybody :), thanks @tautologicaly, and THANNNNKS @damnyouwillis . Hope everyone enjoys themselves!

In other words, Willis (let’s just come right out and admit that the surge in subscriptions was entirely due to Willis) drove US$5200 to Slipshine, some portion of whom will become ongoing subscribers. Not bad for somebody not known for “teh pornz”. One wonders how much he could make with a printed copy (maybe Spike can share details on who does the Smut Peddler print jobs). In any event, the amount of untapped revenue to be made with naughty depictions of not-that-kind-of-naughty characters is significant enough, I’d expect to see others repeating the experiment.

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¹ The actual title is much, much longer². I ain’t typing all that out on a phone.

² Hurr, hurr.

It is now a trend that when an X-Files episode I really remember comes up for treatment in Monster of the Week, it is presented at an arm’s length distance. Not that I necessarily mind in the case of Home, because watching other people freak out at it is awesome, too.

• On top of yesterday’s pre-congrats to Dante Shepherd for 2000 strips, one must also today congratulate David Willis for nine years of Shortpacked!¹, which also marks some sixteen and a half years of continuous Walkyverse continuity. Too bad it’s only going for one more year. Say what?
  

  Shortpacked! is nine years old today!

  When it turns ten, it will cease regular updates.

  That is simultaneously the most respectable admission of devotion to Big Round Numbers, the kindliest advance notice to fans of changes coming down the pike, and the clearest-eyed discussion of why to wrap up a project — namely, the ability to keep on top of primary source material in the face of personal changes in life:

  Maggie and I sort of wanted kids eventually ourselves, and so this was something I hadn’t considered. I mean, writing Shortpacked! without a growing toy collection or the funds or time to watch movies or basically spend all day on the Internet getting mad at dumb people? How is that possible? It isn’t.

  Rather than not put into the strip what he feels it deserves, Willis has been for years now transitioning his chief efforts to Dumbing of Age, a far more autobiographical work; Dumbing of Age starting in the autumn of 2010, as the Shortpacked threads started to resolve. We’ve been in a transition point for his creative efforts for at least the past four years, we just didn’t know all of his intent:

  I figured Shortpacked! would end whenever that kid happened. I didn’t want to leave my characters hanging, so starting in 2010 I immediately started wrapping things up one by one. I gave Amber closure with her father. I gave Amber and Mike a happy ending together. I got Robin and Leslie back together (as was always the plan). I got Ethan the hell away from retail.

  That right there? That’s a masterclass in creative planning. Kudos to Willis for finding a creative outlet that he can be invested in, for doing what was necessary to bring it to the point of financial stability, and for giving his readers plenty of notice that the Walkyverse will be wrapping up at the age of about seventeen and a half².

• Hey, look what I got in: books! It’s been a good two days at the ol’ Fleenplex mailbox. Thanks to Gina at :01 Books for The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, Hidden, and The Undertaking of Lily Chen, and to Bill Barnes for Upgrade Path; their generosity is much appreciated. To receive four such very different books serves to remind me just how broad and deep this medium called comics is. Look for reviews as I have the opportunity to give ’em all a good, thorough reading.
• Quick note: work will be taking me to the Upper Midwest at the start of next week, and as a result my opportunities to update during the day may be scarce. Brief and/or delayed postings may be the result, and we trust that you won’t be too broken up about it. As always, should disaster befall me during my travels, I call upon all of you to avenge my blood.

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¹ Which, if the strip ids are consecutive, would also be the 2002nd Shortpacked! update, wowsers.

² Ironically, about the age that all his characters were when he launched Roomies! all those years ago.

PS: Aaaaaahhhhh!!

Holy crap, this thing is big — physically imposing, heavy enough to be a cause of death if rapidly applied to the base of the skull, and it even smells imposing. Thank you Mr Malki !, this will keep me busy roughly forever. So busy, in fact, that everybody else today gets quick updates instead of long writeups.

• The latest wine-learnin’ class from Kristen Siebecker¹, spoken of in the beforetimes, is upon us², with an emphasis on winter-friendly wines at 7:00pm on Thursday, 30 January, at West Elm in Chelsea. As is her custom, Siebecker has extended a discount to those using the code EMAIL10.
• Herr Doktor Professor Dante Shepherd is about to celebrate a Big Round Number at Surviving The World, and we at Fleen would like to wish him a hearty congratulations a day in advance. Tonight he may be partying like it’s strip #1999, but tomorrow he erupts into the rarefied company of those that have achieved 2000 strips. If my math is correct, he will be one of a literal handful³ of PhD-holding webcomickers to achieve such a feat⁴.
• Dave Kellett put up a future plan for himself today, and what jumped out at me was item #6:
  

  6.) MYSTERY PROJECT: In about 2-4 years, when things calm down a bit, I’m also going start on a new “mystery” project. I can’t say much about it, other than to say… it’ll channel a very different side of my creativity, it’ll take me about a year to complete, and that it’ll be super fun to do.

  It caught my eye because the last time Kellett put up future plan for himself, not quite four years ago, item #4 jumped out at me:

  4.) MYSTERY PROJECT: In addition to Sheldon and Drive, I should mention that I’ve started up a third project that I’m very excited about, but which I can’t really talk about yet. I know, I know…it’s sounds very third-grade of me to bring up a project that I can’t talk about. But here’s what I can say: I’m very excited about it, it’s my first collaborative piece since the “How to Make Webcomics” book, it both is and is not comics-related, and I think it’ll be right up your alley, when it comes time to announce it. More than that, I can’t say. But good things are a-comin’.

  That mystery project turned out to be STRIPPED, which is now so close I can taste it. One can only speculate what this mystery project will be, only we already know that it’s not a film as he took care of those possibilities in item #5. Damn, Dave, you ain’t got to conquer every creative medium known to the species.

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¹ Whose name would apparently translate as they becker from the original German. Names aside, Kristen pretty much put together the first MoCCA Festival, laying the groundwork for all that has occurred since.

² And by us I mean those of us who are within easy travel of Manhattan, and of legal drinking age, and have a desire to up their wine game.

³ This would be a cartoon-style three-fingers-plus-thumb hand.

⁴ Also, while Jorge Cham has on the order of 1700 strips, he’s also got a feature-length movie, so I’m counting him. Deal with it.