After holding forth at some length for the past couple of days, I hope nobody finds it amiss that today I’m mostly letting others say things, especially because they’re very thoughtful things.

• First up, Colleen Doran, whose career in comics spans decades, and whose musings on Bad Publishers remains mandatory reading. She’s in a wide-ranging two-part interview at SciFiPulse, dealing with starting a career and issues of the creator/publisher dynamic in Part 1, and more recent works and her experiences in webcomics in Part 2. She really is frighteningly clever and bravely analytical about the ups and downs she’s experienced in her career; whatever modern creators might encounter, she’s probably already run into some form of the same situation and is willing to share what she’s learned.
• One of the topics that doesn’t get nearly enough consideration, is the question of site design, archive presentation, and users experience. In the webcomics arena, Lore Sjöberg has probably done more thinking along those lines than anybody else, going back to the many experiments of design and redesign at the original version of The Slumbering Lungfish [sadly dead due to evil scammers] and the original of the recently-remade Bad Gods.

  Sjöberg’s lately been putting a lot of thought into Bad Gods, finding ways to separate the writerly bits from the funny bits (or unifying them if that’s what you want), making significant changes since the relaunch, trying to make things intuitive, and thinking about the needs of newbie readers as opposed to longtime invested fans. Those last two links are probably the most significant, as they represent an issue that is likely to only get more important as creators start to accumulate extensive archives¹.

  While keeping everything in print is much easier online than on paper, making it easy for people to find everything has to date largely relied upon having different sites/domains/clearly delineated areas; Sjöberg’s more interested in having a brand built around the creator than any one project². However, as today’s blogging nicely identifies, any approach will inevitably favor some subset of the audience at the expense of another when trying to make things as transparent and intuitive as possible.

  I’m not saying that Sjöberg has identified The One True Solution, just that he’s further along than anybody else in identifying the questions and the trade-offs in different approaches. Good stuff.

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¹ Especially those that have different “tracks” to their content; Sjöberg may be uniquely broad in this respect, but consider the cases of John Allison’s three entirely separate (but linked) webcomics, or Brad Guigar’s plethora of comics sites and entertainments.

² A particularly important advantage if the creator jumps from an established project to one that’s entirely unrelated. Keeping the brand focus on the creator rather than the project makes it easier to not lose audience in the shuffle; they might decide the new project isn’t to their liking, but at least you won’t get attrition from not being able to find you.

You can’t accuse Dave Kellett of burying the lede with respect to the new Kickstarter he’s launched to finish off STRIPPED; not ten seconds into the video the words appear on the screen:

Voice of Bill Watterson

Watterson, a man so reclusive¹ that last summer’s announcement that he’d agreed to provide written responses to Kellett’s questions for STRIPPED was rightly seen as a coup, has actually gone and recorded audio of his thoughts vis-à-vis comics for inclusion in the film. This is by far his most public appearance in the context of comics since wrapping Calvin and Hobbes more than seventeen years ago. Ignore everything else about STRIPPED², that right there is sufficient reason for this film to exist.

And to get things out of the way, yes, STRIPPED already had a Kickstarter that was very successful; as Kellett explains, this second campaign is being held not to finish the film, but to pay the fees (which are well into the five figures and could hit six) for the rights to include footage from other sources: brief clips of Peanuts specials and Johnny Carson interviewing Cathy Guisewite will cost nine grand, for example.

If you already contributed to the previous Kickstarter (and full disclosure: I did), you’ve already had a communications from Kellett and Schroeder that they are not asking prior backers to pony up again. They are specifically looking for people that missed the first campaign (or weren’t aware of Kickstarter at that time) to fund this push not to make the film, but to make it better. It’s a classy move, and I want to congratulate Kellett and Schroeder for not taking the easy route and hitting up people whose names they already have.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, Rob DenBleyker had some interesting news to share yesterday:
  

  The Cyanide & Happiness Show just became the most funded animation project on Kickstarter. Holy shit!

• Okay, so between the C&H show, the Machine of Death game, the Dresden Codak book, and the Schlock Mercenary challenge coins, the high-profile webcomics projects launched in February have collectively raised more than US$1,051,000. Yikes.
• It appears that Saveur magazine really needed submissions for their Recipe Comix again, as they sent Chicago artist Marnie Galloway to Marrakesh and she comicked the whole thing up but good. Galloway had a previous entry in the series, so I imagine that played a part in Saveur offering the trip.

  I’m not saying that if you submit a recipe to Recipe Comix, Saveur will necessarily send you business class to a foreign destination for luxury and gourmet foods, but I can say that if you never submit a recipe to them, they won’t know who the hell you are and thus definitely will not send you on an adventure. Look, they pay for your comics, you might get a fabulous reward down the line, and most importantly, I get more Recipe Comix. That’s a win-win-win, people.

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¹ By extreme coincidence, Ryan Estrada had a couple of tweets yesterday talking about Watterson’s seclusion and Kickstarter. Hell, there’s an entire other movie that’s been produced and now showing on the festival circuit that’s entirely about how the filmmaker couldn’t even get in contact with Watterson.

² Particularly the inclusion of a hack webcomics pseudojournalist on the interview list, inexplicably not buried at the very bottom in tiny type. Given the amount of footage that Kellett and partner Fred Schroeder recorded, if I make the final cut for more than eight frames, something more important is definitely getting shortchanged.

If I may beg your indulgence, I’d like to do something rare and respond to a comment¹, in large part because it expresses something I’ve seen elsewhere in the past couple of days. To reduce the argument to its most basic form:

Strip Search’s first episode was boring, nothing happened.

Which I think is an unfair critique. True, over sixteen minutes there were no screaming matches, no competition, no disqualifications, and no overt drama. This is exactly what needed to happen, as we’re still in the scene-setting stage of the show. Yes, but reality shows have a well-established set of tropes that we’re all familiar with, so we can jump right into the meat in the first three minutes, right?

Well, not really. The shows that jump straight into competition are ones that have tens, dozens of seasons behind them, with a built-in audience that knows how things are going to go. But look back at those shows when were they new and trying to find that audience — you have to get people to care about the contestants before they can care about the competition, and that’s what Strip Search episode #1 did.

“But Strip Search has a built-in audience already” is the usual counterargument, but it doesn’t, not really. Robert Khoo, among other things, is an inveterate collector of data — he can tell you to two decimal places anything of significance about the statistically typical Penny Arcade reader. And one of the things that he’s alluded to over the years (and it’s borne out by how he’s led the company) is that Penny Arcade, despite outward appearances, isn’t really part of the webcomics sector of the entertainment industry. It’s part of videogames sector.

Khoo could tell you exactly what percentage of PA readers read webcomics widely, but I’m willing to be that the numbers are skewed towards those that read two or three other webcomics and only read Penny Arcade². Heck, I’m all about webcomics and I only knew three of the twelve Artists introduced in episode 1, which would give me little reason to care about 75% of the competition had the others not been introduced properly. Khoo’s also been open about hoping that people who don’t follow webcomics at all³ will hopefully find the competition intriguing.

“But why didn’t anything else happen?” is the other criticism I’m seeing. The answer to this one is even simpler: time. Having run many, many episodes of streaming video, one of the things that Khoo has hard numbers on is how long people will watch TV over the internet and those numbers are clear: fifteen minutes is pushing the outer limits of acceptable to their audience. Khoo’s been consistent in describing Strip Search as aiming for a 10-15 minute running time, which limits how much of a story you can tell without running out of time. Look at it this way: depending on whether the episodes run closer to 10 minutes or 15, that’s three or four episodes equaling the runtime of a broadcast show (once you take out commercials, you’ve got 44 – 46 minutes of content per hour).

We’re just now at the first commercial break; this is the exact time that the introductions should be wrapping up and setting up a sense of anticipation for what comes next⁴. We’re most likely going to see the show run a total of nine or so hours, broken up into approximately 36 episodes each in the vicinity of a quarter-hour. Eleven eliminations will take place across eleven competitions. Three episodes per elimination (setup — competition — judging/elimination/heartfelt goodbyes) gives us 33 epsiodes, with three left over for especially complex or story-rich bits to scatter throughout the season.

Not everything will happen in every episode, nor can it unless Khoo decides to broadcast in 45 minute chunks instead of 15 minute chunks. You aren’t watching episodes of a competition show as you’ve grown accustomed to watching them, you’ve watching segments between commercial breaks. On the one hand, that means there’s fewer commercial breaks per hour than you’d get on broadcast; on the other hand, the breaks are several days long. I’d advise viewers eager for big chunks of action to watch three or four episodes at a time and avoid the Spoilers section of the Strip Search site.

The show may ultimately turn out to be uninteresting, or the personalities of the Artists lacking⁵, or the mechanics of the challenges uncompelling (although given Khoo’s penchant for planning for every possible contingency, I’d bet against it). However, it is way too damn early to declare that Strip Search is not good. Oh, and to answer a specific point in the comment that prompted much more than I’d originally intended to write, if Erika Moen wins, that’s when you’ll see a blog-gasm.

• If there’s any justice in the world, today’s blogging by Bad Machinery creator John Allison⁶ on the state of webcomics and the stressors that may construct post-webcomics will provoke many fertile discussions. I am particularly struck the the strain of human behavior that Allison identifies that seeks to enjoy the attention that comes from sharing creations with the world, but in the manner that is least likely to actually reflect back on the creator. Read it.
• Well played, Rich Burlew, well played. Not only have you come roaring back with eight updates of Order of the Stick in the less than two weeks since we noted your big plot twist, you’ve managed to turn said twist around 180 degrees and make a big surprise into a BIGGER SUPRISINGER⁷ [uh, spoilers]. It’s true, I got ahead of myself in my earlier reading, not waiting for the eyes to turn to little Xs, but you’ve covered that base today. Oh, and the pale skintone that crept in during the strip? Bravo.

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¹ Regular readers of this page will recall my oft-stated dictum to Never read the comments, but obviously I have to keep up on the conversation on my own site. Regular readers may also recall that it’s extremely unusual for me to respond to comments, so take this for what it is — a fleeting occurrence, like sighting an endangered bird in graceful, full-song flight, and treasure it. Or at least check off the box on your Internet Opinionmonger Bingo card.

² I’ve long since come to peace with the idea that I am not Penny Arcade’s target audience, and that they will rarely produce content that’s designed to appeal to me. I’ve never played an MMORPG. I haven’t owned a game console since I was a child and we had an original Atari deck. I buy maybe one game a year, and still haven’t gotten around to Portal 2.

³ There’s a reason that Khoo’s got people involved in Strip Search talking to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal instead of just hack webcomics pseudojournalists, and you can bet at least part of the show’s structure is designed for the people that those stories will bring in.

⁴ The alternative — jumping straight to eliminating people without getting to know them — is certainly possible, but would require a different show. Think about it for a moment: to jump directly into competition without getting to know the contestants, you’ve got no emotional involvement. Why bother getting to know contestant #7 if he’s going to be gone in the first 15 minutes, just give him the loser’s edit and bring on the screaming could work, except for the part where Khoo’s stated clearly that he didn’t staff the show with damaged people that could only bring drama, and the part where he states his clear desire to want to do right by the Artists.

⁵ Although I cannot imagine any circumstances so dire that I won’t stick around long enough to see the context in which Hurricane Erika decided to talk about butt virginity.

⁶ And goodness, are we really just weeks away from the release of Allison’s first proper Bad Machinery collection? I say “proper” because while you can have my copy of A Feral Flag Will Fly when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, I do long for a gloriously colorful presentation of The Case of the Team Spirit.

Also, I should note that March and April are going to be webcomicsarrific at Oni Press, as we will also see the next Penny Arcade collection and two (two!) collections of Double Fine Action Comics.

⁷ Shut up, it is too a word.

Weird how that worked out.

• Obviously, the big news is the premiere of Strip Search, with episode 1 gathering the dozen Artists and ending weeks of pure agony on my part. Take away the intro with Mike and Jerry that takes up 45 seconds or so at the beginning, start with the theme music and smiling Nick on a gorgeous lakeside setting — that was start of the footage that Robert Khoo showed me last month, which he cut just as the scene switched to the hotel about two minutes later. He is a cruel, cruel man.

  From my recollection, very little has changed from the rough cut — a more subdued narration is the thing that I really noticed — which makes me think that the production was more polished a month ago than I figured it would be. Naturally, questions abound in my brain at this time and spoilers ahoy if you haven’t seen it yet:

  • Were the Artists permitted to speak during the drive from hotel to house?
  • What kind of looping, circuitous route was taken to help lend a sense of distance from the real world?
  • How much of the booze on the counter was consumed by the end of the first day?
  • What does that yellow note by the front door say?
  • Can the producers confirm or deny that there were, in fact, traps in the house?¹

  There will be a no-doubt thriving discussion of the show over at the Strip Search site, and I’ll do my best to overdose you here. In the interests of full disclosure with respect to my future writings about Strip Search, I consider Erika Moen a personal friend and I am totally rooting for her, but I’m also convinced that it’s anybody’s competition to win.

• Let’s stay in the Penny Arcade milieu for a moment, as I point you towards a video from NPR’s Science Friday featuring the PA Rapper Laureate MC Frontalot. In fact, you can hear Mr Alot in the first hour of today’s broadcast of Science Friday (check for your local NPR affiliate and tune in 2:00-4:00pm EST), or via the SciFri website at your convenience after the feed has gone out.
• Hey, know where Penny Arcade is headquartered? Seattle. Know what else is happening in Seattle? EmCity kicks off in about four hours, but also David Malki ! waited until he got there before recording the latest Machine of Death card game Kickstarter video update. But there is a SCANDAL regarding this campaign that I must reveal.

  Note the background in the video, and the fact that Malki ! has apparently injured a finger on his right had which he has covered with with an adhesive bandage. Note the state of beard grooming and the shirt he’s wearing as well:
  

  Now in that video he finally tells us about the mysterious Kickstarter stretch goal known as FATE BLITZ, which turns out to be a series of videos that were recorded with Kris Straub prior to the Kickstarter launching in anticipation of various outcomes — raising $100, raising $200, sneaking through to meet the goal with less than a day left, etc. You can watch the first Fate Blitz video here, which was recorded in Los Angeles last Fall.

  But! Note the background, the injured finger, the shirt, and the state of beard grooming!
  
  They are identical to the Seattle video. There is, sadly, only one conclusion to this remarkable visual match between videos made yesterday in Seattle and months ago in LA, and that is David Malki ! is lying to you. The “Seattle” video was clearly recorded months ago and the entire Kickstarter campaign since has been an elaborate Potemkin village constructed for show. In fact, no stretch goals have been met, no prototypes have been produced, and David Malki ! is not in Seattle but rather absconding towards the Mexican border with Kris Straub and all their ill-gotten Kickstarter gains in bags stuffed full of money. The “David Malki !” or “Kris Straub” that you may encounter this weekend at the EmCity show are imposters, duplicates to throw you off the scent; should you meet them at the show, be sure to tell them you’re onto their little game and they won’t get away with it².

• After all that deception and chicanery, you’ll no doubt want to cleanse your mental palette. Allow me to point you towards an extended Achewood test clip, featuring Chris Onstad in the role of Roast Beef. The comments³ seem to consistently contain complaints that the characters don’t sound right, with the general exception that Onstad’s voicing of Beef is pretty okay.

  Of course the voices don’t sound like they do in your head; they don’t sound like they do in my head either, but since Onstad was involved in the production, it’s pretty clear that they sound like the voices as he imagined them, and that’s pretty much as close to definitively correct as you can get. I can’t wait until we get a clip with Todd voiced and people complain that he doesn’t sound like they think a tweaking, multiply-dead squirrel should sound.

  Actually, no, I can completely wait for that. What I can’t wait for is to see Achewood get picked up in an Adult Swim-like presentation, 11 minute episodes, with the season climax being a hour-long spectacular adaptation of The Great Outdoor Fight. I will commit to buying that sumbitch at whatever inflated price Onstad wants, right now. In the meantime, I am obsessively running a non-stop loop of Ray exlaiming, Kiss my ass, bitch! I’ll be at Duane’s! with an occasional interruption of You wanna go on a little mini-vacation to Paradise? Come look in my toilet, dude. just for variety.

• Finally, not quite video, but close enough: check out the latest Octopus Pie if you haven’t already. Either Hanna’s upping the octane in her snacks or something weird is going on; at this point, I wouldn’t rule out either possibility.

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¹ My theory is that at some point near the end of production, Mike and Jerry will tell the Artists that The Trap was their feelings for each other. Group hug, awwww.

² Please don’t actually do that.

³ Never read the comments, especially not at YouTube.

Everybody’s on a plane right about now, heading to Emerald City Comic Con; I suppose it’ll be just as bad when TCAF or SDCC come around, but man I’ll breathe easier when this flight lands in Seattle:

.@aidosaur @yaytime @goraina @dresdencodak @caitefa @MagnoliaPearl @hanoodlez @jnwiedle @johngreenart @jonrosenberg on same flight! Wowwww

Go safely, my friends. Oh, and when Aaron Diaz lands, somebody tell him that his Kickstarter cleared US$200,000.

Speaking of Kickstarts, Ben Costa’s Shi Long Pang, The Wandering Shaolin Monk has built up enough pages for Volume 2 to hit, to the production of which you may now contribute. Pàng, The Wandering Shàolín Monk, volume 2 is, in the few hours it’s been up, about 10% of the way towards its relatively modest US$6000 goal. Sure, there are Kickstarts asking for less, but consider that PTWSMv2 will match the form factor of volume 1 (full disclosure: Costa was kind enough to give me a copy at SDCC 2010, namely a full-color, heavy-stock, hardcover volume which is as well-designed an upmarket as anything put out by :01 Books.

For a self-published collection, it’s about as high-quality as you can get, and it’s offered right at the base reward tier, US$25 bucks to get a copy sent to you in August. Bargain of the year, easily, and that’s before you factor in the pitch video, which features 1970s-style Hong Kong cinematography and cheapo, out-of-sync dubbing. For anybody that grew up watching Black Belt Theater on channel 11 out of New York (or your local equivalent), the video is a trip down nostalgia lane, and no less than one would expect from the Dean of Iron Crotch Studies at Iron Crotch University¹, and founding publisher, Iron Crotch University Press.

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¹ Home of the Fightin’ Rusties.

Everybody is either in transit to Seattle for EmCity or making final preparations before leaving tomorrow. I could mention that Dresden Codak’s Kickstarter is being reported as the fastest-funding initial 24 hours of any comics project and is already the #8 most-funded Comics project after approximately 40 hours, or that the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter has just unlocked something called — rather ominously — FATE BLITZ, but we’ve heard enough about those two projects of late, so I won’t.

Instead, two brief items:

• One, for the next while, Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya will be running Lucky Penny in lieu of their regular diary strips. For those that didn’t catch the announcement last year, Lucky Penny is an original graphic novel by Panagariya and Ota for Oni Press, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a release date just yet. The shift to LP will let Ota work on just one thing for a while, hopefully speeding the day when we see a print collection, new Benign Kingdom projects, and more.
• Two, I have on past occasions mentioned Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar’s Al’Rashad: City of Myths, a weekly longform comic of politics, religion, intrigue, and characters that tell you what you need to know about them by how they dress¹ and hold themselves when they speak. It’s terrific stuff.

  But please note that I said “need to know”, as for a great deal of time I have wanted to know a great deal more about these characters and the world they inhabit; my guess is perhaps 10% of what Bird has world-built in his head will ever see the page. And wonder of wonders, Bird has answered my silent plea with a character page chock full of biographical and geopolitical nuggets that make my heart sing. I am so happy that I’m not even going to engage in the privilege of every comics reader and kvetch about the obvious contradiction between biography and previously established story and clearly Bird doesn’t care about continuity like true fans would and … [Editor’s note: At this point Gary was dragged away and had some manners slapped into him; we apologize for the fuss.]

  Ahem. As I was saying, please enjoy Al’Rashad, updates Mondays, and please overlook both my misplaced enthusiasm as well as my inexplicable omission of Al’Rashad from the recommended comics list over there to the right. Get to reading.

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¹ I particularly note that the Caliph of Al’Rashad dresses very plainly, which reveals great deal of his character.

The annual scramble for San Diego Comic Con hotel rooms started at 12:00 noon EST and by 12:02 I was done with a promise of an email with my assignment. Here’s hoping.

Oh, and since this is going to be a Kickstarter-heavy post,let’s get something non-Kickstarter out of the way up front — I have of late been enjoying the crap out of Help Us! Greatest Warrior, which appears at a Tumblr near you The title character is bean-like, more than a little dude-crazy and will utterly kick your ass if she can be bothered. Creator Madéleine Flores has been killing it, and you should hit the (very brief) archives right now.

• Is this new? I think this is new. David Malki ! posted in an update for the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter that he will use the powers of technology to add a special reward for backers that also back a different, unrelated game. This is, I believe, the first Kickstarter crossover:
  

  Story War is a little bit similar to Machine of Death in its broad strokes (“combine random elements to accomplish a wacky objective”), but varies in the particulars.

  If you pledge to both games (physical versions), we’re gonna compare our backer lists and each send you an exclusive bonus card: a Machine of Death card that references Story War, and a Story War card that references Machine of Death! We’ll also send you a PDF with a set of suggested CROSSOVER RULES for combining both cards in HIGH STAKES INTERLEAGUE PLAY. [emphasis and SHOUTING original]

  I can’t wait to see what other cross-pollinations this might lead to. In this case, it’s a match of equals (both Story War and Machine of Death are well over their goals, so neither is trying to gain success by drafting off the other), but I could see especially successful projects being approached by struggling projects, trying to succeed via cross promotion that mostly goes one way. Secondary market, anyone?

• Speaking of secondary markets, about ten days back we mentioned a new service from TopatoCo called Make That Thing with some speculation about how MTT might be structured and a promise of more details soon. That was supposed to have been last weekend via an interview with TopatoCo VP Holly Rowland, but weather systems (and now EmCity) got in the way, so we’ll be talking with Holly next week.

  In the meantime, Make That Thing had a public unveiling last night, and we’re able to see some of how MTT is going to operate. In addition to shipping and fulfillment services, MTT will be offering promotional services, and will also be able to offer certain kinds of production:

  Because each campaign involves a high amount of personal attention and attention to detail, we only take on a handful of projects at a time, and only those that we think match up well with the kinds of things we know how to make – primarily comics, books, and games.

  We don’t know how to make USB toasters or solar-powered flashlights, so we simply won’t take on Hardware, Design, Video Game, or Fashion projects. Other people are better at that than we are. However, the rewards for your project are heavily weighed toward the following:

  • Printed materials (books, comics, posters)
  • Printed or embroidered apparel items (T-shirts, polos, neckties, aprons)
  • Novelties and baubles (stickers, patches, bookmarks, foam swords)
  • Other things that don’t involve inventing a new type of manufacturing apparatus

  Then we might be a good fit.

  They’re in closed beta right now, and as MTT finds its feet, I suspect they’ll be taking on projects primarily from the existing roster of TopatoCo clients. However, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if future clients found an MTT campaign as being similar to an audition for joining up with TopatoCo as an ongoing client. More when I get to chance to talk to Rowland, where I’ll be sure to ask who thought it was a good idea to leave a forklift with the TopatoCo Funployees.

• Speaking of Make That Thing, we knew that the Machine of Death card game was going to use MTT on account of that was sort of their soft launch. Now we know that their second client will be the Dresden Codak book which is well into holy shit territory with nearly US$120,000 raised in the first 15 hours. Aaron Diaz¹ has been hard at work since launch trying to come up with stretch goals that he hadn’t anticipated needing for a week or more. Even if you don’t read Dresden Codak, go check out the campaign just for video, then ask yourself honestly how fancy your pants are.

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¹ The Tolkien and Dinosaur Scholar Par Excellence. Oh my glob, Aaron, you need to draw the main players of The Silmarillion as maniraptors.

I ain’t Elisabeth Kübler-Ross but I do know something about the stages of grief, such as when Achewood (the once-unstoppable behemoth of absurdist-realist philosophizing) sputters to a near-halt¹. As noted previously, Chris Onstad is not my bitch and however he may find joy in producing aspects of Achewood that I may then consume, it’s all good. I get to share that particular creation that he lets loose on the world whether it’s once a day or twice a year, and however much I may miss it, I cannot complain too much about not getting free entertainment on a my desired schedule rather than that which Onstad can accommodate given the shape of his life.

So it is with a mixture of excitement and don’t-get-too-excited-yet that I noted his first Achewood-related bloggance in more than a year:

Hi. I’m back. I have some good news for you. It’s been a long time coming. A lot has changed since I fell off the face of the earth.

First and foremost: I’ve been working with a team of artists, engineers, and producers to bring Achewood to life. To give it the voices, richness, and opportunities it never had as a comic strip.

I’m flying to Los Angeles today to begin a week of network pitch meetings. If things go well, we’ll find a home for our show. Please cross your fingers for us, send us your good energy. And please, share this clip with your world. I’m very proud of what we’ve done.

There are many other things I want to share with you. About Achewood, about this, about all the loose ends, and about my plans for it going forward. This is the tip and the bulk of the iceberg, but there is much more. It’s been a very busy couple years, full of life-size tragedies, manifold germinations of happiness, and surprising rebirths—just like Achewood.

The pitch meetings mentioned are to explore the possibility of an Achewood-related animated series? special? film? project of some sort, the teaser of which makes me smile. Because I’m totally in the tank for Achewood, I’ve been parsing through those 19 seconds of sound and motion² for any clues they might offer³. Because I’m a realist, I know that even properties with a constituency within an entertainment company can be optioned, paid for, and spend years or decades in development without ever coming to fruition. At this time, possibilities exist — which is more than was true last week.

• Poorcraft 2, on the topic of traveling on the cheap, is well in production and on Saturday Poorcraft bookrunner Spike dropped some news on it. While P2 will see Diana Nock returning for art duties, Spike herself will be stepping back from writing duties as Ryan Estrada — webcomics own Marco Polo — handles the script. Or handled, as the book is well into the gettin’ drawed stage, meaning that Estrada’s work is largely done. Can’t wait to see how Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here turns out.
• Updating our EmCity seating information, news comes this morning that a fairly substantial chunk of Artists Alley island F will be given over to Benign Kingdom. The official exhibitor’s list mentions B9 occupying seat F-16, which is also listed as the home of Johnny Wander. However, word is that B9 will actually occupy seats F12-F16, of which three seats are listed as occupied, and two not listed, which tells me that Grand Vizier George is probably planning to have people rotate into the space seats throughout the show, as well as giving the usual occupants a little more breathing room than is normally found in Artists Alley.
• Given that various Strip Search parties have said that the show will be launching this month, and that the Strip Search site lists the show as running Tuesdays and Fridays, and there’s only one of those weekdays left in the month, Im’a keep a browser window refreshing tomorrow. If nothing else, I’ve been very impressed with the Artist interviews that have run, and how well the Strip Search producers (possibly Khoo) are at stirring up shit in such a blatant fashion. If there’s a reunion show, we may see murder yet.

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¹ To wit: five strips in all of 2011, twelve in the first six months of 2012, and zero since.

² As opposed to Sound and Motion.

³ Such as the 0:11 mark, where it appears that Teodor has been retired in favor of Roast Beef as Ray tests his Whiskey á la Mood sampler. It also appears that Ray is the centerpiece of this teaser, which makes me wonder if he still sounds the same as when Onstad voiced him.

So Howard Tayler’s Kickstarter is running at some 3000% of goal and counting, and he’s got a really important update that you should read. Certainly, read it if you’re a backer, but also read it if you’ve ever considered running a Kickstarter yourself because he talks about how your plans can get completely pooched not just from failing at a Kickstarter, but from succeeding too well¹.

The original scope for this project was as follows:

• Fund the creation of up to five different coins, at volumes which allow me to sell them at conventions, and keep stock on hand.
• Fund at somewhere between $10k and $20k after thirty days.
• Ship all the coins in mid-April

For reference, Tayler is just shy of US$55,000 as of this writing. Between Tayler’s experience and other runaway successes we’ve seen where the delivery of rewards becomes a serious burden², I’m starting to wonder if creators should make much more liberal use of limited rewards. Expecting to see no more than X to Y and a proportional number of backers, and you’ve arranged your schedule for the next few months around those assumptions? Limit the rewards so if you get a blowout success in the opening hours, you aren’t obligated to do more than you’re capable of.

If there’s pent-up demand, you can always say, I’m gratified so many of you want in on this, I’ll whip up some new rewards tiers and let the rest of you give me money while making the appropriate shifts to your schedule. And hey, nothing drives up interest like initial scarcity. If you’ve got a relatively straightforward set of rewards with a predictable production schedule, reliable supply chain, and scalable delivery operations, feel free to leave everything unlimited. In all other cases, some hard-nosed realistic self-assessment will probably be what stands between you and madness.

• Speaking of Kickstarters, Zach Weinersmith wrapped up his this morning, raising US$341,667 towards his newest book. If my math is correct, the number of backers he’s gotten at the various tiers means he’ll be signing his name approximately 4194 times in the various books that get signatures. Although many of those signatures will come from earlier books, which means Weinersmith may already have them signed and his hand won’t fall off the week after the big pallets arrive at his house.
• Nobody does data–sharing like Dorothy Gambrell³, and it was gratifying to see that her latest way to envision information is blowing up all over the damn place in the last couple of days. You won’t find it on her website, though, as it was made for Psychology Today’ February 2013 issue. In case you don’t subscribe, the editors have made her infographic of where missed connections occur by state available. If you’re a Scientologist, it’s all over Tumblr without attribution, which totally sucks.
• More EmCity participant notifications have come in, meaning I’ll have to go back to my earlier post and update the lists and maps. In the meantime, please consider yourselves notified that John Troutman and Ryan Smith will be at table Q-19 in Artists Alley.

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¹ Paging Rich Burlew, who gets all the slack in the world for an unpredictable injury that forced him to stop work for months, but who also wound up in the situation of having to create 25 separate product categories and try to keep nearly 15,000 backers happy while being just one person. That’s the sort of situation that sends sensible, grounded people on benders that take Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas as a to-do list.

² Above and beyond the simple shipping aspect, regarding which I will have more to say next week; the real work is in the design and production of everything you promise.

³ Except maybe Randall Munroe. If Gambrell and Munroe ever collaborated, my brain would explode from sheer enjoyment.

First, a quick update on yesterday’s Webcomics Folks and Where to Find Them at EmCity posting: Kel McDonald was kind enough to let us know that her booth (number 1008, for those playing at home) will, in addition to herself, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter, also be hosting Meredith McClaren, David Willis, and Tyler Crook. Keep the updates coming, people.

Okay. To my knowledge, the greatest overfunding of a webcomic-related Kickstarter on a percentage basis is not Homestuck (which achieved a relatively modest 355% of goal), Smut Peddler (415%), Diesel Sweeties (2006%, now we’re talking), or even the vaunted Order of the Stick (2171%), but Darren Gendron’s Monster Alphabet board book, which scored a funding rate of 5015%. Granted, the goal was only US$500, but a fifty times overfunding is pretty damn impressive.

I mention all this because Howard Tayler¹ launched a Kickstarter for a collectible last night at 10:00pm EST and had funded less than four minutes later. As of this writing (just over 13 hours into a 30 day campaign), Tayler sits at just under US$40,000 on a US$1800 goal, putting him at 2214% of goal, putting him past Order of the Stick and coming up on halfway to Gendron’s achievement.

Again, low funding goals make overfunding percentages easy to hit², but take a look at the projection on Tayler’s project, which is on track for an unreal 34,286%. Yes, yes, I know — Kicktraq projections never come true, or Ryan North would have cleared US$1.7 million and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck more ten times that. But! Look at the initial Kicktraq projected values vs actual funding and take them as a ratio and you’ll get a fairly narrow range³:

• Homestuck: 5.75
• Smut Peddler: 5.17
• Diesel Sweeties: insufficient data (only last four days shown)
• Monster Alphabet: insufficient data (dates don’t correlate with campaign)
• Hamlet: 2.92

Across a wide range of initial goals (US$500 to US$700,000) and a wide range of overfundings (355% to 5015%), the ratio of initial projection to final funding runs between about 3:1 to 6:1. If these are representative, Tayler can expect to take in somewhere in the range of US$100,000 to US$200,000 (as of today, since the projection has gone up since yesterday, probably because it launched so late in the day), with a percentage funding of somewhere between 5500% and 11,100%. Of course, my sample size is so small as to make predictions laughably inaccurate, thus the very wide ranges given.

And you know what’s weird? That’s not even the oddest thing about this campaign. The oddest thing (apart from the fact that Tayler, who’s self-funded all his rather pricey books, is Kickstarting at all, especially for such a low-total item) is that Tayler opted to make something that has such a tenuous connection to his core IP.

The challenge coin (or “coins”, thanks to stretch goals being obliterated almost immediately) has never appeared in Schlock Mercenary. He had to explain what challenge coins are in the opening paragraphs of his Kickstarter description, and yet he’s hit upon something that his readership simply cannot live without.

Furthermore, this I didn’t know about these things existed but it must be mine is priced above the usual impulse buy for an unknown quantity⁴. The challenge coins are related to Schlock Mercenary (two of them, at least; the stretch goal “Not my circus, not my monkey” coin is Howard trying to import a Polish aphorism) but not as directly as a book, and they’re an unfamiliar type of item.

That’s the key takeaway today — your fans may not know what they want and a sufficiently unique item (don’t bother with challenge coins, that’s been done now) may just take off into the stratosphere. If you’ve got an item that can be produced in a wide range of quantities at decent margins to yourself, Kickstarter means there’s no reason not to try.

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¹ My evil twin. Happy eleven-and-a-quarterth Birthday next week, Howard.

² As in so many things, Rich Burlew’s Kickstarter was an anomaly, being both massively overfunded on a percentage basis and having a very high initial goal of nearly US$58,000. To a lesser degree, Ryan North’s Choose Your Own Hamlet is also a trendbreaker, with a higher-than-normal goal of US$20,000 and an achievement of more than 2900%.

³ Again, Order of the Stick is an anomaly, as the initial projected total wound up less than the actual total, giving a ratio of 0.718 which just doesn’t ever happen in nature.

⁴ I’m basing that statement on Jon Rosenberg’ Quantum Theory of Money which states that fans at a show are willing to part with up to twenty bucks without too much hestiation.

However! From my many hours assisting at booths at various conventions, I can tell you that quantum unit holds for something that fans recognize, like a t-shirt. I know what a t-shirt is, and it features a design related to something I like is the situation that leads to that twenty changing hands.

Odder items are more likely to follow the rules for impulse purchases, whereby somebody that isn’t a fan is willing to drop money on something they don’t know, or actual fans are willing to drop on something that isn’t represented in whatever they’re a fan of.

Impulse buys max out at five bucks. Anything more and you can see the gears turning in their heads — I don’t know this thing, so I’m not willing to risk a great deal of money against the possibility that I may not derive as much utility or enjoyment from it in the future as I suspect I might at this very moment. I really have to stop listening to the Freakonomics podcast, it’s rubbing off on me.