I love it when creative types are creative in more than one way, and I mean that as sincerely as I’ve ever meant anything in my life. Case in point: Andy Bell has more creatures, critters, robots, and things in his head than he can reasonably contain, and within the room I presently occupy, I see them in the form of vinyl toys, paintings, stickers and printed books. Were I to move to the kitchen and open the freezer, I’d see them in the form of ice cubes; somewhere upstairs is a zipper pull shaped like meat, and there are also sculptures and plushes and things that I don’t own. Specialization is for insects.

• But, Gary, I hear you cry, that’s one webcomicker type that works in multiple interesting ways. Who else? Glad you asked me, Sparky; how about Jeph Jacques, one of the proverbial¹ giants of webcomics, has launched a project close to his heart: a Kickstarter to record his next Deathmøle album in an actual studio, leading to CDs and possibly vinyl.

  The Permanence campaign cleared goal in an entirely predictable 2.5 hours, no surprise there — until you consider that it launched in the dead of night when not so many people were paying attention, and that 2.5 hour mark was at approximately 2:15am. In the twelve hours since, the project has closed in on spitting distance of US$25,000 and is well on track for six digits of total given that there’s still 29 and a half days to go. Heck, even if metal’s not your thing, check it out just for the names of the backer tiers, and keep an eye out for stretch goals once Jacques has a chance to think them up.

• Okay, that’s two. What else you got? How about voice acting, a topic that is near and dear to my heart? I trust that you have all seen Natasha Allegri’s complete Bee and PuppyCat, yes? And you noticed Wallace, right? And you noticed that Wallace was voiced by Frank “Becky and Frank” Gibson, right? This makes our Frank the sixth (and possibly best) Frank Gibson at IMDB, officially qualifies him for a Bacon Number of 3 (via Tom Kenny), and makes him entertainment industry royalty. Yay, Frank.
• These examples are somewhat obvious, Gary; can’t you come up with something that stretches the idea a little? Straight to the breaking point, if you like. Look, merch design is a part of the webcomickin’ game, and thus the push of Penny Arcade into the world of cloisonné pins is just another bit of merch. Except what they’re making isn’t just merch, it’s a social ecosystem with rules, artistic and business partners, and a touch of fanaticism for good measure:
  

  If you have pins from a previous show (Boston or Australia) you should bring them [to PAX Prime] to trade or just to show off. I saw a guy in Australia holding a cardboard sign on the last day that said “Will trade dignity for PAX East pins!” If you do have some pins from another show to trade I can promise you they will be like gold at Prime.

  Like a lot of social ecosystems, I’m not sure that I want to get in on this one — I have enough completist tendencies that the “Gotta catch ’em all” impulse would likely become dangerous to my sanity, my wallet, or both. However, I will state here and now that anybody cared to set me up with a Robert Khoo and/or Brian Sunter, that would be awesome. No particular reason, nope. Definitely not a secret shrine in my basement, no way. Honest.

• Finally, if you want to get a good idea of what kind of multi-modal² creativity exists/mutates/is possible in webcomicking and beyond, the annual symposium³ to such ideas will be kicking off in the DC Beltway ‘burbs the weekend after next. Intervention is back for its fourth iteration, having hit that self-sustaining point far quicker than is usual for the smaller-scale, single-hotel type shows.

  The guests and programming are eclectic, the participants range from audience to enthusiasts to major pros, and the cross-pollination of creative energies are going to be considerable. For those looking to step into other areas of creative expression, it ought to be of considerable interest.

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¹ Literal as well. How large is Jeph Jacques? In that photo at the top of the page, the Cintiq in the foreground is the new 57 inch prototype.

² Oof, what a horrible word. Sorry for that.

³ In the original sense of the word: drinking party.

So it appears that the necessary stars have aligned with Chris Onstad’s brainmeats and selectively produced whichever bit of neurochemistry prompts the creation of Achewood, and there was … to be honest, scattered rejoicing. This is, after all, the first strip in 415 days, and only the 16th episode at all since the Ray In Rehab storyline started.¹

Not that I am complaining. I’ve written previously about how I try to regard Onstad’s schedule; it’s clear that whatever my desire for more Achewood may be, he has long since regarded his primary creative identity as something other than Achewood’s writer/artist. That’s cool; David Lynch doesn’t do comics very often, either². I’ll leave the indefinite hiatus descriptor over in the blogroll for a while yet, see if Achewood comes back on something resembling a schedule; if not, I’ll enjoy it whenever it drops. All I have to do is regard it as the webcomic with the waiting for the trade habit built in.

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¹ On 23 November 2011, meaning that 16 strips have been spaced out over 625, or an average of one update every 39+ days, meaning that Aaron Diaz is pleasantly surprised to find he works faster than Onstad does.

² Or perhaps more aptly, Thomas Pynchon doesn’t give us novels very often.

Although the best rule one can follow on the internet is Never Read The Comments, I find it for somewhat obvious reasons useful to go through those at this site. The post from Tuesday of this week attracted some comments that caught my eye, not only for their length, but for the mention of something that’s been on my mind a fair bit. Responding to my commentary on his latest Kickstarter, the probable cover identity that self-identifies as Eben Burgoon discussed his logic for resubmitting an initially-unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign; here’s the important part:

I really fundamentally looked over the Kickstarter last time and rethought my plan of attack. The main thing –- hire Lauren as the artist and do so with my own pocket money so that my goal was far more reachable. She’s an incredible talent, deserves to be paid for her hard work, and if I am going to ask the internet for money to help see this work to it’s end –- I sure as hell better pony up too.

The Lauren referred to would be Lauren Monardo, a colleague via the Brainfood Comics project, and creator of several comics that aren’t really accessible on the web right now¹. Monardo’s credentials (which are excellent) aren’t the point here — the important part is the bit about deserves to be paid for her hard work and I sure as hell better pony up too.

Burgoon’s regard for his artist made me happy, particularly because I’ve spent entirely too much time reading Ryan Estrada’s For Exposure twitterfeed and watching his dramatic re-creations of people that don’t think artists should be paid. Hopefully (although in truth, I hold out very little hope for this), the bozos who have provided Estrada with so much material will look at Burgoon’s example and realize that their pathological short-sightedness is not the only way to approach making comics.

• Speaking of art having value, there are times when you can get away with not paying a creative collaborator — when said collaborator finds value in something other than up-front cash², or volunteers to work for free, or is dead and the work is out of copyright. That last one doesn’t come up too much, but may do in the not-too-distant future.

  Evan Dahm (whose work you should be familiar with, seeing as he’s put a few thousand pages of it out there for you to enjoy for free) has of late been noodling around with images inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; that would be the original Wizard, the novel by L Frank Baum, adapted a few million times³ since it was first published in the dawning days of the twentieth century.

  Many people have taken their artistic whacks at the Oz milieu since W W Denslow’s original illustrations, notably the work being done presently by Skottie Young for the Baum novel adaptations being published by Marvel. Dahm isn’t talking about doing a sketchbook though, or an adaptation; he’s thinking bigger:

  My name is Evan Dahm and I would like to illustrate and publish an edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was published in 1900 and is now in the public domain. I like it a lot and I think I can illustrate it in a way that works with the story and has a visual character that’s distinct from other interpretations.

  I can’t recall anything like this happening previously. There was an edition of Huckleberry Finn with racist language softened a few years back (which prompted an emulation with the n-word replaced with robot), and there have been some pretty beautiful comics editions of classic works (Kipling seems to be a favorite there), but I can’t recall somebody producing a new edition of a prose work to do their own spin on illustrations.

  And what illustrations! Dahm’s new Baum-sketchbook Tumblsite is full of promise as he starts what will likely be a lengthy project; he’s set ground rules for himself that guarantee that it’ll be years before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum with illustrations by Evan Dahm sees print. However long the wait, I’m ready to grab a copy.

• Also speaking of art having value, here’s an emergency commission announcement from Dean Trippe. whose MacBook had a crisis and requires replacement as soon as possible. If you like Trippe’s meld of clean line and capes, he’s declared an impromptu convention complete with bargain pricing for superheroic inked drawings. DeanCon lasts through the weekend, so get your requests in now while you can.

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¹ The Slightly Askew Adventures of Inspector Ham & Eggs leads to a dead page, the Brainfood Comics page has a bunch of unreadable symbol placeholders and a Call of Duty 2 ad, and may be somebody squatting on Monardo’s former domain.

² Possibly an ownership stake.

³ Sadly, a Google search for “wizard of oz” puts Baum’s novel (the first of 14 in the Oz series) sixth behind various references to the 1939 film, although some of those are because one of three surviving Munchkin actors died at the age of 89.

Corrections first, as yesterday during the hourly updates of A Softer World #1000 I spoke of alt-text disappearing as each new row of images was added to what ultimately was a twelve-part story. In fact, the alt-text changed with each new update but was not lost — it was added immediately below each row of photos, below panel #1, in grey text, upside down, and I overlooked it. It’s even right there in the screenshot I used in the post and I missed it. Fleen apologizes for the error.

• Also yesterday, I happened to notice that both Dinosaur Comics and Surviving the World dealt — by coincidence, no doubt — with the subject of time. The last time I can recall a coincidence of such proportions, two strips had hideous monstrosities from the deep, and before that there were the crocoform references the day that Steve Irwin died. Precedent and all that.

  A’course, then both Messers Shepherd and North decided that each was the future self of the other, which is a weirdly Möbius-like kind of time-tangle of the sort that gives me headaches. If they are each other’s future selves, Shepherd seems to be taking a cautious approach to the risks involved, North appears to be doubling down, and Rich Stevens knows what time really is: a vector for regret. I trust this will tide us over on the coincidence-o-meter for the next two, two and a half years.

• Big Round Number o’ The Day: Jon Rosenberg¹ has just dropped the 500th consecutive scene on us over at Scenes From A Multiverse. While 500 updates on a MWF schedule over three years isn’t all that uncommon, bear in mind the more than 2000 updates over at Goats (presently between hosts, but accessible via the Wayback Machine), where it updated regular-like from April 1997 until April 2010; together they represent an unbroken stream of increasingly dense storytelling, complete with bizarre side-trips, twists, turns, and existential crises.

  If you can think back as far as April 1997, think about what there wasn’t: no PvP, Penny Arcade, Diesel Sweeties, Schlock Mercenary, Sheldon, SMBC, or even other webcomics with names starting with letters other than P or S.

  The Walkyverse was still six months from launch, Achewood another four years out, xkcd another four years still. Matthew Inman was still more than twelve years from launching the site that would eventually explode all over Charles Carreon, nobody alive could tell you about Homestuck, and even “Iron Man” Crosby’s Superosity didn’t start until 1999. Of all the webcomics still updating, pretty much only Help Desk and Kevin and Kell predate Rosenberg’s run.Oh, and there was that inaugural NCS Award for On-Line Comic Strip and all.

  Rosenberg’s cast a long shadow and now seems as good a time to recognize. Congrats on 500 Jon, yeah, whatever — and thanks for the innumerable contributions before.

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¹ Standard disclaimer: Jon got me into this blog-based opinion-mongering gig, and at present is kind enough to spare the server space to host my daily word dumps. Our relationship is close enough that I actively avoided mentioning him on this page for close to six months after Fleen launched, to avoid any appearance of impropriety. With all that said, feel free to take this item with the appropriate amount of salt.

As noted last week, A Softer World launched a Kickstarter campaign and released their 999th update, leaving everybody (or at least me) wondering what Emily and Joey would cook up for strip #1000.

Wonder no more.

What initially appeared (to me, at least) as a double-size update has been growing over the past few hours:

We are updating the 1000th comic all day! It’s like a story! A whole big STORY! *passes out* PS KICKSTARTER

As of this writing, it’s eleven rows tall, and each time another strip is added the alt-text changes with it. I suspect that there may be meaning — even a parallel story — there, all those yellow pop-ups will be lost in time, like tears in rain.¹

• There’s been a foofaraw in the writerly corners of blogistan for a couple of days, as a posting credited to the VP of the Horror Writers Association (and on the HWA Los Angeles chapter blog) purported to divide the world into professional writers and — gasp! — hobbyists, and succeeded mostly in pissing off a great number of professional writers. As is often the case, I find the John Scalzi (who is not the only writer I follow that scored only 1/10 on the quiz, far below the 8/10 necessary for validation) may have put it best:
  

  Here’s the actual quiz for knowing whether you are a pro writer or not:

  1. Are you getting paid to write?

  If the answer here is “yes,” then congratulations, you’re a professional writer!

  Okay, that’s Scalzi in snippy mode; he made an even better point a bit further down:

  The problem with [HWA VP’s]² quiz is that it confuses process for end result. Her quiz is about process, and presumably her process — what she thinks is necessary for one to do in order to produce the work that create the end result of making money as a writer. But process isn’t end result, otherwise in this case I wouldn’t be a professional writer, which I clearly and obviously am.

  Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things [HWA VP] describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. In this respect this quiz defeats its own purpose — it offers no indication about whether one actually is a professional writer, only whether one has jumped through the process hoops that one single writer believes are important to become a pro. [emphasis original]

  This thought of process vs status has been on my mind a fair bit; I don’t think that I’m letting any cats out of any bags to say that Brad Guigar asked me to do a first read on The Webcomics Handbook³, and I find it suffused with a tone of Topic A: Okay, here’s how I do it, and this works for me; you may find a variation on this that works better, or a way that’s completely different and that’s cool. What matters is what you produce. and how few absolutes there are. Maybe Guigar should send a copy care of the HWA.

• Speaking of what you produce, readers may recall that international mystery man Eben Burgoon of Eben 07 launched a Kickstart for a side project called B-Squad back in December, one which didn’t fund very well, and was ultimately unsuccessful. Like others before him, Burgoon has opted to resubmit the B-Squad, a technique that is rarely successful.⁴

  Unlike those others before him, Burgoon is capable of learning from his mistakes: he’s redone his project scope (reducing a US$8000 goal to US$3000), tinkered with his stretch goals, and borrowed successful ideas from other projects (case in point: challenge coins). As a result, he’s much more likely to succeed the second time around.

  In a domain where success is too often assumed to be inevitable, it’s natural for Kickstart campaign owners to look towards successes as things to emulate. These might be your own previous projects (such as Bill Barnes, Paul Southworth, and Jeff Zugale funding the second Not Invented here collection), or they may rely on accumulated name recognition and goodwill (say, Tavis Maiden taking a boost from Strip Search to launch a new strip, much like his fellow Artists have done). It’s rare to see somebody adjust approaches after a stumble rather than just have a hissy fit⁵ about it. Here’s hoping that Burgoon is the start of a trend.

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¹ Rutger Hauer is the man.

² I’ve taken the name because it’s pretty obvious in the posting, and because I suspect that the VP in question is taking a fair amount of shit today for the pretty significant overreach in the original article. I just don’t feel like piling on right now, as I’m presuming that the mistake was one of execution and not intent. Should reports come about that no, the execution matched the intent that that’s actually the viewpoint being promulgated, I may reconsider this notion.

³ Spoiler alert: it’s very good.

⁴ No names, but seriously I’ve seen Kickstarts that failed to raise even ten bucks resubmitted with nothing changed expecting a different result.

⁵ Again, no names, but remember the guy whose project failed to fund and he changed the video into an obscenity-laden screed about how the world didn’t deserve his genius ideas? That was great.

I think I just set the record for the most convoluted title of an embloggenation event.

• Inspiring: From R Stevens, a comic where the punchline precedes the rest of the strip and universal armageddon doesn’t look so bad.
• Beautiful: Via a link I saw on Kurt Busiek’s Tumblr, a comic that muses on the nature and relative worth of questions and answers, and is perhaps the most lyrical explanation of the scientific method I’ve ever seen. Keep scrolling, it’s a good ‘un¹, and keep your eyes on the site of creator Kostas Kiriakakis, as there is some damn fine work there.
• Uncomfortable Truth: Evan Dorkin on rejection; it’s too long to quote here, as I’d end up quoting the entire damn thing. Creative types, read it very carefully.
• Confounding (In A Good Way) And Kickstarted: Brandon Bird sees the mundanities of life (like Law and Order reruns and Christopher Walken) a little differently than the rest of us; looking about the landscape, he decided that nothing could be more mundane than Sears² stores. Where other eyes skim past the ubiquitous, Bird sees a subject crying out for portraiture, and thus he has launched the most confounding (in a good way) artist’s journey I have yet heard tell of, Project: Sears, to travel the country and capture the essence of Sears:
  

  I guess I like the fact that Sears can be completely unique, while also being nearly indistinguishable from any other Sears in any other part of the country (the inherent contradiction of Sears).

  It’s about the point that the word “Sears” has been used so much that it’s beginning to lose all meaning in my brain. Sears, Sears, Sears, Sears, which is a pleasant enough state of cognitive dissonance. Plus if you follow the Kickstarter link, you can see a painting of a Sears that is seven feet long!³

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¹ As opposed to Good Un.

² Or, more formally, Sears, Roebuck & Company, the 110+ year old department store chain and early purveyor of catalog shopping.

³ The painting, not the Sears itself.

I have but two things for you on this, a rather nice Friday afternoon:

• TCAF exhibitor applications for 2014 now available. Showrunner Chris Butcher may be chilling in Japan right now, but the organization he built is on top of things and the process of curation for next year’s show is well in hand. If you want to make sure that your application is as good as possible, never fear: applications will be considered until 18 October (individual creators) or 15 October (publishers and those requesting multiple tables), so no worries about getting shut out if you didn’t apply in the first twelve seconds. As a side note, TCAF has expanded in recent years from one weekend every other year to a weekend every year, and in 2014 it will add a Friday’s worth of non-exhibition content (that would be 9, 10, and 11 May, 2014).
• Boulet, for whom this page has a deep and abiding respect, not least for this ability to crank out a lot of gorgeous pages very quickly, dropped something fairly amazing on the internet today: an epic (and I don’t use that word lightly) vertical-scrolling pixel comic titled The Long Journey. How long is it?¹ Long enough that the image at the top of this post is one sixty-fifth of the full comic. At least partially in honor of slightly more than nine years of ‘net-based comics, it is (like much of Boulet’s work) sprawling, contemplative, philosophical, and absurd in equal measure. Go read it now and understand that while the infinite canvas² has much potential to annoy, sometimes it’s downright sublime.

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¹ That’s rather a personal question, sir.

² Shhh! Nobody tell E. B-White!

We told you a few weeks ago about Kazu Kibuishi and his commission to redo the covers for the Harry Potter books; he made the trip to New York for the final image unveiling (and to meet readers and fans). The cover images for the seven books, plus the slipcase and spine art, can be seen at the Scholastic website, alongside the original Mary GrandPré illustrations. They’re beautiful, choose iconic moments from the story to choose, and typically depict Harry in a state of acting rather than a state of being, if you take my meaning.

But it’s a picture in a tweet that makes me really appreciate the work that Kibuishi’s done.

You may recall from our discussion that he proposed doing back cover images as well as front covers, and Scholastic agreed; the back cover for Sorcerer’s Stone was shared a few hours ago and it took my breath away. The close up figures and faces of Harry and his parents could be neighbors to Emily and Navin, it’s so in line with his style; at the same time, it’s unmistakably Harry, Lily and James Potter, their postures and body language conveying all that the longtime (or first time, for that matter) reader knows (or will know) about that family.

As it turns out, I recently passed my hardcovers of the Potter books onto a niece and nephew who weren’t yet born when the books finished; I may need to pick up the boxed set when it releases just to have the visuals in my home.

Further recognition:

• Jeph Jacques hit the Big Round Number (strip count) of 2500 on Monday, and today he hit the Big Round Number (years) of 10 today, in the midst of a story arc that I think he could spend a year or so on without it getting boring¹. It’s been a long, long journey for Jacques from strip number one, with the requisite drama and upheaval both in-strip and in real life. Here’s hoping for exactly as many more Big Round Numbers (strips and years) as he finds he has to share².
• Speaking of Jacques, one of the things that impresses me about him is his desire to be creative in multiple media; while the comic is what gets the attention, I have the feeling he could happily compose and record music for Deathmøle pretty much forever. Likewise, the very funny Chris Hastings is never one to rest on his laurels, stretching out to the lighthearted side of comics writing for Marvel with Deadpool and the recently-announced Longshot miniseries³.

  He’s also, for most of the past year, been studying improv, which I feel has only sharpened his comedic instincts, and for the first time he feels he’s ready to share his new skills with the public at large. If you’re in Manhattan tonight, Hastings and his team will be in the improv competition known as INSPIRADO.

  It’s okay, I didn’t know that was either, but he explained it to me a while back. Two teams compete to perform comedy based around challenges taken from the letters I N S P I R A D and O, and it’s possibly — likely, even — that the word is not completed due to failures of one or both teams. If I recall his explanation correctly, the O stands for Oh shit as the challenge becomes impossibly hard, and it’s rare that a team reaches ultimate victory. We at Fleen join all right-thinking people in wishing Hastings and his team the best of luck, and we would totally be there if not for this stupid day job.

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¹ Namely, the state of artificial intelligence in his world. Specifically, he’s dealing with the concept of robot offense and robot punishment, which is downright fascinating.

² Also butts.

³ Hastings shared with me some of what he’s doing in that miniseries, and even as a not-particularly-familiar-with-Marvel reader, it sounds frickin’ hilarious.

Guys, all my free time has been spent getting caught up on work from my two weeks away from work, so I’ve only found a little bit of news to share with you. The mad geniuses at Make That Thing have teamed up with the madder geniuses at A Softer World to Kickstart the fourth ASW collection, Let’s Do Something Wrong. Said campaign went up yesterday just late enough to not include it in my Kickstarter musings, it’s halfway to goal, and somewhere a bird-decorated photographer and a chess-playing maniac sit confident in the knowledge that they’ll get to make this book.

Miscellaneous things I noticed in conjunction with this campaign:

• It is spare, almost spartan, in the reward structures, and the lack of announced stretch goals: you can get a PDF version of the new book, the new book in softcover or hardcover, in some combination of new plus prior books, and two tightly limited “experiential” rewards — Joey and Emily include you in the strip; Joey and Emily do a commentary track for your favorite movie. MTT knows how much it would suck to fall behind on delivering product, especially given recent high-attention KS flameouts, and so is limiting the campaign to what they can absolutely deliver on time. Bravo.
• Today’s ASW is strip #999, so this is a perfect time to announce a print collection.
• Going back to MTT for just a moment, I noticed that since their soft launch in/around the Machine of Death Game, this is the sixth project they’ve been involved with (the MoD Game, the Dresden Codak collection, the Surviving The World calendars) or directly owned as project creator (the Boxer Hockey frogs, the Sam & Fuzzy omnibus¹). Six projects in six months is pretty impressive, and with a total funding of nearly US$1.3 million, I can’t wait to see what they can do when they’re fully ramped up.

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¹ Technically, that one’s by Make That Thing of Vancouver, BC instead of Make That Thing of Easthampton, MA. It’s the same people. Also, I saw the blanks for the S&F omni at San Diego; Sam Logan was getting a bicep workout just lifting the damn things. They’re huge.

So there was a fairly big project implosion on Kickstarter last week, a guy that may have fundamentally misrepresented what the money would be used for, spent it all over about thirteen months and then told his backers they are outtalucko with respect to the rewards but that they will all get paid back, no really. This has led some to conclude that Kickstarter is fundamentally broken because people don’t exercise enough due diligence when backing projects. I both agree and disagree with this premise.

I don’t think that Kickstarter is fundamentally broken (at least not yet — its use as a second-order financial instrument is something I’m still wary of), and I think that people don’t exercise enough due diligence, at least in some communities of Kickstarter. I’ve written before about the reasonably dismal record of people campaigning to fund dead-tree comics who have no experience (writing, drawing, publishing) and figure that a promise that the story will be so awesome you guys is enough to magically produce thousands of dollars — and that comics people generally don’t buy it¹. Conversely, I’ve learned that the boardgame sector of Kickstarter is (anecdotally, at least) willing to take flyers on new, unproved talent, perhaps because importing Eurogames is so bloody expensive, getting burned for US$20 or US$25 every third or fourth campaign may still get you more product for your expenditure than you would see otherwise.

It’s possible for experienced creators with a history of making stuff to get bogged down making things and thus to see expected shipping dates slip in the face of massive production demands (especially when unexpected circumstances come into play). Frequent updates and progress reports can help soothe those situations, but I’ve heard that Mr Guy from the first ‘graf was making lots of updates that weren’t entirely truthful about the progress being made, so trust is a key factor. Creators with a history of not screwing up (or even better, limiting their projects to what they know they can deliver) and creators with relationships with proven fulfillment services ought to be just fine. Kickstarter’s only broken if its function was to facilitate doomed projects.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, one launched just yesterday for Ross Nover’s first collection of The System (with the obligatory less-than-24-hours funding success, helped by a modest US$3000 goal), and one is about to end as Maki Naro’s Sufficently Remarkable approaches its final two days. The traditional last-few-days bump is looking a little muted for Naro’s campaign, so now’s the time to get in on that if you were gonna. Me, I’m just glad that he cleared the US$30K threshold for the official Pineapple Maki Drink Contest which I am entering so hard. I made up a batch of falernum last night just to ensure I’d have enough for my drunkological experiments, and I stand ready to sacrifice pineapples to the cause. Viva!
• Hat tip to boing boing for noting that four months after he dropped some magic on us, Randall Munroe’s slow-playing comic, Time, has finally wrapped up with some 3000+ frames. You can view the whole thing in various speeds at Geekwagon. The word epic is frequently overused, but it seems appropriate in this case. Countdown to Monroe’s next uncredibly seriously large project starts … now.

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¹ Seriously, I saw a pitch once for a guy that had never produced anything comicky in his life, wanted twelve grand, and you didn’t even get a print copy of the comic — a whole 20 pages worth! — until US$35 in pledge. I think he raised a total of seven bucks, on account of it was a screamingly obvious Bad Deal.