One of my favorite creators in any medium is Richard Thompson¹ and I’ve just heard a really great interview with him on New York’s public radio station, WNYC, with the always-entertaining Leonard Lopate. Lenny (as those who listen to him invariably refer to him) asked Thompson early in the interview about the nature of creativity.

When asked if he could describe the creative process, Thompson wryly noted that he’d … never heard anybody do that successfully. I just write stories. and when that prompted a question if he particularly approached songwriting by doing lyrics first, he said he will … do it both ways, start with music, start with lyrics, the hard thing is starting the process.

Then came the question that made me go back and transcribe a lengthy answer, and the reason I wanted to point out the interview to you in the first place. Noting Thompson’s prolific and lengthy career², Lenny asked if he ever gets writer’s block. The answer:

Today? Yesterday? The day before yesterday? Yes, I do. What I do to try to overcome it is to have something half-finished that I can be working on so there’s always 30 or 40 songs that are just one-verses and I can go in and think “I can just touch that up” … I just try to keep ticking over.

Want to create something? Keep moving, don’t pause, don’t wait for divine inspiration to strike. While it’s tempting to think that 1952 Vincent Black Lightning sprung from Thompson’s forehead fully formed, it sat around half-finished and embryonic same as everything else that is now complete and whole and wonderfully executed. And if you aren’t familiar with Richard Thompson’s work, for glob’s sake go listen to some (may I suggest you start with the Song-o-matic?), because he might be 63 years old and look like your grandfather, but he’s still got the nimblest fingers that ever saw a fretboard.

• Chris “Super” Yates³ has some more webcomicker Baffler!s up for your consideration, this time by KC Green. They’re tasty.
• Reminder! You still have two days to get in on the comment-enters-you contest for a free! copy of the not-yet-available-for-purchase Johnny Wander volume 3.

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¹ This time I’m not talking about Richard Thompson the cartoonist, but Richard Thompson the musician, although it occurs to me they have some similarities. Both of them excel at bringing unusually clear personal vision and POV to their work, and fly under the radar in popular consciousness. But if you ask a cartoonist who their favorite cartoonist is or a guitarist who their favorite guitarist is, all of a sudden the name Richard Thompson becomes a lot more prominent.

² His newest disk, Electric, was released yesterday, and was recorded in its entirety in four days, giving it a raw immediacy and energy that artists half his age can scarcely manage (cf: his cover of Oops I Did It Again). It might be his best since Rumour and Sigh

³ Not to be confused with “super yachts” unless, of course, you can’t spell.

Strip Search appears to be on the verge of going live, having graduated from a parking page to a test pattern. I’m not a betting man¹, but I’d wager that we’ll see the site live in the next day or two. Then it’s just a matter of how long Robert Khoo feels like teasing us before the first episodes start streaming.

• Webcomic? Check. Crossovers? Check. Print collection? Check. Original print series? Check. Card game? Check. TV show? Check. What’s left of Malachai and Ethan Nicolle to conquer? Judging from the photos tweeted by MTV² Geek, the answer would be toys. Weirdly, searching for “Axe Cop” at the website of Mezco Toys brings up a couple of Thundercats figures, so I guess they’re really early in the preview cycle for now. There’s a reference to Axe Cop in Mezco’s exhibitor profile for next week’s New York Toy Fair so I’d say wait for the summer’s big shows to see these generally available.
• To paraphrase James³ and Marque, Being broke sucks, and now Jerzy Drozd is the latest creative type to try to make it suck less. Tomorrow will see the Comics Are Great! show will do an on-air Google+ hangout, with special guests Laurianne Uy and Poorcraft scribe C Spike Trotman on the topic of smart frugality. If you can’t make the Hangout, tomorrow at 12:30pm EST (GMT-5), it’ll be up at the Comics Are Great! YouTube channel sooner rather than later. It’s a live event, so warm up your questions on how to make do with less for fun and profit.
• Surprisingly, nobody is in the running for a free copy of Johnny Wander volume 3, as per the contest announced last Friday. It’s not even in the store yet, people! You can only get this is you were in the Kickstarter! Free book, people!

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¹ It’s that whole “pretty good at math” thing.

² Who’re still on my list for the shameful way they treated Rick Marshall Willenholly, so you best watch yourself, Viacom!

³ History’s greatest villain.

We at Fleen have, in the past, mentioned the need for creators to keep backups of their work so that years of effort can’t be lost. We’ve mentioned creators who’ve had the bad fortune to run afoul of those who would use their sites for nefarious purposes. But last week took the proverbial cake as the main Blind Ferret hosting servers got taken down by nefarious types, seemingly not to host their own content, but for the sheer vandalistic joy of breaking stuff. I come to this conclusion because they didn’t just break the websites — they also wiped the local backups.

Have we ever mentioned how many webcomics are hosted by Blind Ferret? It was a week of creators scrambling to redirect URLs to secondary sites, wondering how much content might be lost, and sleepless night after sleepless night for the BF crew to try to restore as much as could be. It is my sincere hope that if the miscreants behind this attack are ever identified, they get to learn first hand exactly how many swords and crossbows Ryan Sohmer keeps around the office.

There were some bright spots — Danielle Corsetto got her site back, minus a big chunk of blogposts, comments, and alt-text for her comics. By coincidence, Bernie Hou was able to surprise her with the news that as part of his work for the imminent Comic Chameleon beta launch, he actually had all her alt-text and was able to return it to her — everybody send some good wishes towards Hou, on account of he did Corsetto a solid. But even more than Bernie Hou is a stand-up dude, the lesson here is Backups don’t exist unless they exist in multiple places.

There will never be a way to completely defeat those with server-murder on their minds, but you can make things more difficult for them and reduce their impact to you from A week of frantic workarounds with all the attendant loss of traffic, advertising, and audience to An inconvenience mixed with a bit of righteous rage.

Find out from your server folks not only how backups are being taken, but how they’re being kept. If the answer isn’t On removable media in another room, and preferably another postal code, politely inquire what would be necessary to get a bit more of an air gap in the mix. Oh, and if your favorite webcomic is a bit clunky around the edges, archive not loading, things not absolutely perfect? Give ’em a break while they’re rebuilding.

Let’s finish up on something cheerier! Much like he did almost two years ago, mad scrollsaw maestro Chris Yates is going to spend a couple of weeks doing one-off Baffler! puzzles with designs by fellow webcomickers, then put the whole tranche up on eBay. The first entry of Webcomics Baffler Fortnight 2¹ is courtesy of Angela Melick² and features some seriously joyful bees. Engineers man, we get bees.

Anyways, the next two weeks will reveal who the other creators are/what their designs look like, and they’ll go up for auction on Monday, 18 February, so keep an eye on Yates’s Flickr set or the Baffler! store page, figure out what your budget and favorite puzzles might be, and best of luck to all in the bidding. Unless you’re bidding against me in which case I hope I bury you and salt the earth where you fall. Nothing personal.

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¹ Electric Baffaloo.

² Right-hand rule. Respect.

Feeling somewhat less insane today. Dunno what was up with that. Hey, is that a copy of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff? I gotta get on reading that!

• Speaking of books, I received this week my Kickstarter-backed copy of Johnny Wander volume 3, which is an awesome read. I actually was given a copy by creators Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya a bit more than a month ago (thanks), so I’ve decided to give away the copy that came in the mail. You (yes, you) know somebody that doesn’t read Johnny Wander and should; tell me about who that person is and why they need to read JW, and you’ll win the book. Best comment contribution by, let’s say end-of-day next Friday, 8 February, wins for their friend/relative/whoever.
• Speaking even more about books, the Young Adult Library Services Association has released their annual list of best graphic novels for teens, and there’s some familiar names on the list. In addition to the almost obligatory Raina Telgemeier’s Drama and Hope Larson’s adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time, you’ve got Chris Eilopoulos & Nate Cosby’s Cow Boy, and a whopping six entries from :01 Books: Hades: Lord of the Dead by George O’Connor, Broxo by Zack Giallongo, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke, Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks, The Silence of Our Friends by Jim Demonakos, Mark Long and Nate Powell, and Sumo by Thien Pham. That’s like one book out of three of their output in 2012. I’ll also note that Drama, Friends (boys) and Friends (silent) were also listed as among the top ten for 2013.
• Happy ten yeariversary to Dinosaur Comics and the nearly-resurrected Ryan North; highlights of the past ten years (from North’s perspective beyond the grave) are here¹, and you can see how far he’s come as an artist by comparing the first strip to today’s. Congratulations for being so awesome at comics Ryan and also for getting better at parties. In your hono[u]r, please enjoy once more this review I wrote of your first Dinosaur Comics book, composed entirely of quotes by T-Rex.
• East Coast (of the United States, that is) denizens! Make your way to New Haven, Connecticut and the Ivy League university contained therein by next Friday, as “Hurricane” Erika Moen will be speaking at the IvyQ conference. According to the conference schedule, that’ll be at 2:45pm in WLH 208; I’m told that “WLH” stands for “Harkness Hall” at 100 Wall Street on the campus of Yale, which is apparently the home of Yale’s LGBT Studies program. Tell Erika I said “hi” and “Hope you won Strip Search although I won’t know for months yet”.

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¹ Warning: features photos illustrating North’s fetish for oddly spherical dinosaurs crushing Admiral Ackbars. It’s kinda out there?

Publisher’s note: Usual Fleen scribe Gary Tyrrell was found curled in a small fetal ball, sobbing; he is now resting comfortably in hospital. The following was found scribbled on various pieces of paper near him, along with a Subway employee’s apron and hat.

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Publisher’s note: Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is available from TopatoCo, while supplies last. Doctors indicate that Gary is detoxing nicely, and should be back to blogging with only mild perceptual impairments shortly. Rumors that the DEA is investigating SBaHJ for making readers “high as balls” could not be confirmed at press time.

• Magnolia Porter is doing some of my favorite comics right now, writing adolescent characters that feel like actual kids: friendships are made, and challenged, and there are enthusiasms and jealousies and oh yeah, a mysterious corporate conspiracy has turned parts of their bodies into giant battling monsters. Monster Pulse never loses the ability to surprise me, and after too long a time it’s getting a proper book of the first six chapters, available at your nearest Kickstarter access terminal now.

  Let me also say that I love the brevity and clarity of Porter’s pitch:

  Please help fund the first volume of Magnolia Porter’s Monster Pulse, a YA adventure comic about kids whose body parts transform into fighting monsters. Six chapters of this critically lauded series are collected in this first book.

  That’s it — it’s everything you need to know; no hype, no wild promises, just the facts. If the story hook doesn’t appeal to you after that description, it never will. While I think that Porter could have talked things up just a bit more (she’s very modest about her work), I’m not sure it would entice anybody that doesn’t want to know more about battling monsters anyway. Get it, you’ll love it.

Is Everything Fuzzy And Hazy For You, Too?

I … I’m not sure why, but it’s really hard to think co … co … coherently today. Actually, yesterday waasn’t so good either. The last time I remember my brain working right was Monday, jsut before I opened a package from ToopatosCo. I’m probably just tired.

Whi.le I’m trying to get my act together again, how about some things to look at with your eyes and see them .

• After a pretty long hiatus (a touch more than three years, actually), Bryant Paul Johnson has given us just one more (dare I hope for more) update of Teaching Baby Paranoia, this time delving into the little-known history of Sputnik, dental conspiracies, and the shameful era of payola. Trust me, it’s the only thing that’s making sense in my head for the last couple of days.

Never doubt this: Robert Khoo knows how to build anticipation; with approximately three minutes of rough cut of Strip Search episode #1, I had a feel for the show, and the all-important contestants (or “The Artists”, as Strip Search dubs them) meeting each other scene (bright and early at 7:00am on a recent December morning in Seattle) about to start, Khoo stopped the playback of the video.

That’s all I can show you he said, his tone expressing deep regret while his facial expression showed that if he’d gotten my attention, he wasn’t really regretful at all¹.

Khoo invited me to meet with him and Penny Arcade designer (and Strip Search producer²) Erika Sadsad over the weekend to talk about the show; the screening was a surprise to me, and despite the fact that it was incomplete (graphics were all placeholders, the voiceover is still to be finalized), I was struck by how slick it looked. I’ve seen first episodes of reality programs that broadcast on actual TV channels that didn’t look as polished as the start of Strip Search did. So how much can you learn in three minutes?

• The twelve contestants got their smiling pose intros, singly and later in a group (with giant cutout standups of their self-drawn avatars)
• The house they were put up in is frikkin’ gorgeous
• At least one challenge might relate to being a webcomicker only tangentially, as there was about a half-second of footage at a go-cart track³
• As previously noted, there are tropes that show up in reality show after reality show because they work; watching Mike Krahulik solemnly intone, Yours is not the strip we’re searching for made it official: this is a real show, not playing at a show.

Quick aside: Sadsad noted that there had been some support for the much less serious Abandon strip! as the elimination catchphrase, but it was rejected as being too flip. Seeing what The Artists put on the line (both giving of their time and revealing themselves without knowing how they would be ultimately portrayed), it was decided that the production would have to treat them more respectfully than that. Khoo echoed this, noting especially how Krahulik hit a particular point where his respect for The Artists became a major influence on his participation. The dynamic between The Artists and The Creators (that would be Krahulik and Jerry Holkins) shifted from showrunners/showrunnees to something more peer-oriented; as Sadsad put it, That was when Strip Search went from playing house to being a house.

The nature of how people will be portrayed was a major theme of our conversation; as Khoo put it, The Artists have become very publicly friendly and respectful towards each other, but he noted that they haven’t seen the footage that’s being cut down for the episodes. Khoo stressed again the desire to not try to stretch The Artists into roles or create perceptions that weren’t true (and plenty of reality competitions have clearly tried to do exactly that; with creative editing, anybody can be made to look like a sociopath), that there wasn’t a team of writers trying to pigeonhole anybody into the tried-and-true roles of The Bitch, The Arrogant Dick, or The Antisocial Spoiler.

That’s an important distinction, given that “reality TV” has a reputation for constructing personal interactions and storylines out of whole cloth. Granted, some of these stories may be fictional (but boy do they have the ring of truth), but it’s absolutely true that the Writers Guild of America considers most reality TV work to count as constructing a story. Khoo stressed that the approach taken by Strip Search was at the documentary end of the spectrum that ran from Tell what happened to Get a bunch of footage and make shit up⁴. Nobody tried to adopt a villain role, so there wasn’t a push to create one in the production. Khoo also stated that while there will be no way to tell the entire story of what happened in the mansion, there was a natural narrative that emerged during filming.

Let’s expand on that thought a moment — there will be no way to tell the entire story because Sadsad reported there being a total of 62 days worth of footage, which will need to be cut down into approximately 36 episodes of about 15 minutes each. Nine hours total (which is actually on the order of what a season of a reality show would run) out of nearly 1500 means that all of the DVD extras in the world won’t capture the entirety of what happened. Still, Khoo opined that the entire process was Easier than PAX since once PAX starts, it has to stay in motion; Strip Search’s longer production timeframe allowed for changes to be made to make things adapt.

Asked about what kind of changes they would make to a (as yet, theoretical) second season, Khoo and Sadsad mentioned putting the various challenges closer to the mansion and building in break days in the production, as the filming was one continuous block. That was actually a telling detail because they hadn’t been willing to say how long production took in December; but combined with an earlier statement that challenges each resulted in one elimination, that there were no “no-elimination” challenges, that gives a lower duration of about two weeks production, assuming one challenge per day. A careful investigator might look at the twitter- and blogfeeds of the twelve Artists for the month of December, looking for when they stopped posting and taking that as corroboration⁵.

Other information of note:

• Consistent with his last interview with Fleen, Khoo would not say that there is or is not a winner picked for Strip Search at this time. He did ask that everybody keep in mind that given the winner will have a year in residence at Penny Arcade, so production of Strip Search could be considered to go for quite some time under any definition.
• “The Puck Situation” was avoided in the sense that Nobody put their hand in the peanut butter. Khoo spent months of due diligence, digging up entire electronic lives on The Artists⁶, but that it wasn’t really possible to know who they were until they’d arrived and were interacting in person.
• The challenges were designed to produce a winner with the ability to make a successful career of webcomics (and it was repeatedly stated that any of the twelve could have plausibly won the competition; there were no sacrificial Artists), but asked if the process had also been successful in choosing somebody that the Penny Arcade family could get along with for a year, Khoo stressed the responsibility that PA had towards the winner. We will do them right. People put their necks out there and trusted us; we didn’t tell them shit. They didn’t know what the show would be like or how we would make them look. For taking that risk, Khoo is determined that the reward is as good as he can make it.
• Strip Search will have a dedicated site, in large part constructed to eliminate what Sadsad finds annoying in the sites of other reality shows. There will be polls, bios, extra material (like the art created in each episode and a showcase for the Artists), but it will also be possible to visit without getting spoiled on the front page as to who won or lost a challenge. The material will be presented by episode, will a separate section for those who have seen it. The launch should be in the next week or so, at StripSearch.tv (it’s currently showing a placeholder).
• Strip Search will run twice a week, approximately 18 weeks, which I speculated means a three episodes per challenge structure: one to set up the challenge, one to show the work, one for judging and elimination. Add in some interview cutaways and reactions, that gives an even dozen challenges in 36 eps, neatly mirroring the Artist count. As expected, Khoo refused to confirm or deny this speculation, so I guess we’ll all have to watch to find out for sure.

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¹ This is somewhat of a recurring theme when talking to Khoo; if you ever have the opportunity to interview him and you ask a question that is slightly leading and he replies … Sure. Why don’t we say ‘yes’?, please note that he has not actually answered in the affirmative. He is asking for reasons to not confirm whatever you are asking, and he is enjoying that bit of obfuscation immensely.

² Asked what “producer” meant, Sadsad noted that she had been logging events in the house, helping with the logistics of filming, and Put about 2000 miles on my truck ferrying The Artists to and fro. It was a series of 16 – 20 hour days for however long the production was going on in Seattle, a time frame that neither she nor Khoo would divulge.

I should also note that self-described Principal Beep Boop Engineer at Penny Arcade Kenneth Kuan was also present for what must have been a mind-numbingly boring hour and a half, as he hadn’t worked on Strip Search and professed a strong dislike for reality programming in general. Thanks for putting up with me, Kenneth.

³ Khoo also made a throwaway reference to pitching The Artists off a bungee tower, but I don’t think he was being serious.

⁴ Kuan had expressed that a considerable amount of his antipathy towards reality shows stemmed from a feeling that the shows
he had seen in the past forced an identity onto people rather than portraying them as they actually are.

⁵ The data-mining is left as an exercise for the reader, but should you start digging, consider this: Khoo was willing to discuss one item that he had previously decline to answer directly, namely that eliminated Artists were kept in town until production was done. The second house was dubbed The Afterlife, and when it was suggested that this residence was stocked with booze and hookers of various genders, Khoo found the notion amusing but did not directly deny it.

⁶ One should note that two of them — Lexxy Douglass and Erika Moen — have had prior professional interactions with Penny Arcade.

There are things that you want to get right, I mean really right. Like when Robert Khoo sits you down in front of a laptop and says I’m going to show you the beginning of the first episode of Strip Search, you want to make sure that your scribbled notes get bashed into something resembling actual coherence before they see the light of day. It’s just polite, and while I’m pretty sure that Khoo hasn’t ever had a blogger killed for badly mangling information, I also don’t want to be the test case. So Strip Search news tomorrow, and other things today.

• Firstly, Christopher Wright (of Help Desk and other computery comics) got down to some serious technical forensics over the weekend, looking at a latter-day webring/ad service called InkOUTBREAK and what appears to be a mechanism whereby they deliver ads that are not visible to the reader, to the webcomic that they’re running on, or anybody other than the mechanical code that counts up things like impressions. There’s no part of this that I can quote without lessening the impact that it should have, so go read the entire thing now, please.

  Wright’s key points, as I read them, are:

  • Ads that a webcomic creator cannot see, and did not agree to, are running without the knowledge of anybody outside of InkOUTBREAK
  • Since the creator can’t see them, if there’s a dangerous payload in one of those ads, they have no way of dealing with the issue, and will be the ones blamed by malware warnings when they can’t clear them out
  • Ads that aren’t visible but which appear to be counting towards impressions skate a line between “questionably ethical” and “fraudulent”

  Brian King of InkOUTBREAK responds to Wright’s analysis in the comments, and his argument boils down to Oops, old code, was supposed to be removed, sorry you encountered an old build. Given Wright’s conclusion that the code in question was designed to specifically hide the extra ads from any casual (or not so casual) inspection, you can decide for yourself how much King’s explanation is plausible. Whatever the truth of the matter is, InkOUTBREAK is going to have its code very closely examined by a large number of people in the future, I’d imagine.

• Scott Kurtz’s long-teased Table Titans launches today, and it is one handsome site. I’m still hunting around and finding new content, which includes gaming stories; creatures and gaming techniques from contributors to gaming systems; bloggings; and oh yeah — a longform story comic running Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a heck of a lot more than I was expecting, and looks to be a labor of love that Kurtz will value at least as much as PvP. With the variety and volume of content (daily!), it’s less a “webcomic” and more a “full-service portal” and one that a lot of people I know will be watching very closely.
• Received in the mail over the weekend along with an unrelated book order: one Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff collector’s coin, such as one might find in the SBAHJ Hardcover extravaganza. The obverse has a three-quarters bust of Sweet Bro¹, and the reverse proclaims WINNER. It is the most pointlessly beautiful thing I have ever seen and will become an heirloom of my house, passed down the line of descent like even unto the Ring of Barahir².

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¹ The spot where the artist’s signature or initials would normally appear on a coin reads “sign”. That’s with the quotes and everything.

² That one was for you, Aaron.

Yeah, no way I’m giving you a photo of that. You’re welcome.

• From the long-awaited good news desk, Lore Sjöberg has a reliable web presence again. It’s coming up on two years since some [suitably angry adjective] spammers decided to jack Sjöberg’s main domain (the sadly still-offline lungfish.com), taking down much of his related sites. And then his hosting company offered him a new site that came pre-compromised by spammers.

  Yep, in between the time they said, Okay, here’s the server credentials, go crazy and Sjöberg logging in for the first time, hackers had already made their presence known. And, if I recall correctly, the hosting company decided the proper remedy for this was not to give back his money because it’s clear that their product can never be trusted, but to rather extend a billing credit and insist he use their clearly-untrustworthy hardware. Man, screw those guys.

  About ten months ago, Lore managed to resurrect his previous awesome site of awesome things, The Brunching Shuttlecocks, so at least we again had access to his creations of the pre-Lungfish era. A week later, he managed a partial reconstruction of his most recent site, Bad Gods, and earlier today he announced that’s it’s back in a form that merits his satisfaction and available for your perusal, so peruse. Peruse, damn you!

  Really, all of this is just an excuse for me to point you towards some fairly neat content-bending that Sjöberg’s done, where if you search for something that was original presented in many parts, it gets knit together as a single page:

  First off, I realized that whenever possible a continuous narrative should be displayed in a single page. The impetus for this was realizing that Wikipedia has some truly massive articles, but they’re presented in a single page, and nobody complains about that. So my expectation is that putting a major Sean and Wormwood arc all on one page probably won’t bother people. Certainly it will bother fewer people than having to click “next” over and over would.

  The key words being continuous narrative; search for “Sean” at the new Bad Gods and you’ll get the option to scroll between the multipart Sean and Wormwood, The Friendly Satanists stories. But if you wanted to search for the Monster Manual Comix or Lore Brand Comics, they’ll be one to a page, since they’re all oneshots. Tragically, the Bandwidth Theatre shorts appear to be searchable only by individual name, so it’s a good thing there’s a list of them over at the Brunching site¹.

  But! The new Bad Gods is nothing if not an experiment in user interaction, and I have little to no doubt that Sjöberg will be continuing to tweak and refine and make it easier for people to find things. It’s sorta what he does.

• Also worth noting today: our friends at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco have announced a new gallery show that is sure to merit the attention of anybody that’s ever found the combination of pictures and humor to be worth their time and attention. Chuck Jones: Drawing on Imagination (100 Years of an Animated Artist) runs 9 February to 5 May, with a reception to be held end-of-March-ish (details to be announced).

  Anybody creating comics or animation, or perhaps enjoying them, or maybe just sitting around and breathing at any point in the last half-century or so knows that Chuck Jones was a giant in the field, and likely a cherished memory at the very least. He was one of our great humorists, one of our great storytellers, and so very, very important in our culture. If you can possibly make it out to the city by the bay and see this exhibition, do so.

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¹ And holy cow, the never-to-be-surpassed brilliance that is the depleted uranium beholder statue is twelve years old? Dang.

That title was “Linkapalooza”, and it featured a photo of Frank Zappa in an Uncle Sam-patterned oversized novelty tophat because at that time that title produced that result in a Google image search. Anyhoo, things to point you towards today.

• James Kochalka may have retired American Elf, but he’s keeping plenty busy what with voicing Grotus in the SuperF*ckers shorts [NSFW, obviously] and starting a new strip for his local newspaper¹, and collaborating with Shmorky on a comic that fits hopes and dreams and malice and loss into one page. What I am basically saying is that you can keep up with all your Kochalka needs by keeping an eye on his Tumblr.
• Jim Zub, one-man living embodiment of the creation/destruction duality that undergirds comics, is back with more of his ongoing series of analyses of how the heck you make it in such a crazy industry. His latest looks back at a year of Skullkickers² running on Keenspot (starts here), which has brought the online reader to the end of the second story arc and just into the first story of the second Tavern Tales collection. It’s a topic that we at Fleen have discussed with Zub more than once over the past year, but seeing numbers puts everything in perspective:
  

  Skullkickers online has garnered just over 5.8 million pageviews and been visited by 272,000+ people over the past 12 months. More than 90 times the number of people who buy our monthly issues have checked out Skullickers online so far. Each month an average of 22,600+ new people come on board the story and the site generates almost 486,000 pageviews. I don’t know how it compares to other webcomics (though I’m sure it’s far lower than a lot of the long running and financially self sufficient sites) but it’s reaching 7-8 times our floppy comic print run worth of new readers every month, building up awareness of the title day by day using content we already had archived and ready to go. [emphasis original]

  That bit about “content we already had archived and ready to go”? That’s Zubese for “free money”.

• Over the years, we at Fleen have been eagerly waiting for Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It, her very sexy time-travel self-makeout story of sexy sexiness. Unfortunately, over the years, We Can Fix It (which has been complete forever, come on guys) has been repeatedly delayed by the publisher, which to be fair, they may have had extremely good reasons for doing. It may be working out for the best, as Top Shelf³ have had Fink go back and make everything even prettier than it was before Also, because she loves you, Fink has posted a seven page preview where Future Jess resolves that make the past as sexy as possible by making out with it. Oh, like you wouldn’t.
• A bare 24 hours since our posting yesterday, and Zach Weinersmith’s newest book collection has gone from about US$40K on Kickstarter to damn near US$110K (as of this writing). He’s burned through twelve more stretch goals, extended the Map Of Mystery twice, and had to space out new goals to increments of US$10K instead of US$5K, because they were being achieved too quickly.

  One may note that Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543 is in the Kickstarter Comics category, and the not-quite-resurrected Ryan North’s To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too is in the Publishing category, meaning that Weinersmith cannot break North’s record ’cause different categories. However, looking at their respective backers-and-dollars reports at Kicktraq, one can see that Zach may well hit Ryanesque numbers by the time this is done in — my glob — a month.

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¹ Note for our younger readers: a “newspaper” is a means of distributing information by printing it on multiple sheets of thin paper, folding to a convenient size, and making it available for sale to interested parties. Formerly, they roamed the American landscape in vast herds, but the population has lately dwindled to near-extinction levels.

² Which tends pretty much all the way towards the “destruction” end of the spectrum.

³ Who are all the very best people, and I always make sure to drop by their booth at any show I attend to buy anything I don’t have already, but also just to say hi. Seriously, they’re wonderful.