Webcomics are beginning, ending, making transitions … it’s an unusually busy end-of-year timeframe, presumably because of the oncoming Blood Wave and Dogstorm and general Superpocalypse. Better get these mentioned before we all expire in terror.

• Goodbye For those that missed the (admittedly soft) announcement, James Kochalka is ending American Elf in an orgy of dental hygiene. But at the same time, the animated SuperF*ckers is off to a good start, which brings us dangerously close to a chorus of the circle of liiiiiife, etc, so let’s just be glad we got as much of American Elf as we did, and watch to see what Kochalka does next. My guess? Something awesome.
• Hello Scott Kurtz has been talking up the work he’s put into developing the soon-to-launch Table Titans for so long, it was easy to think of it arriving at some nebulous point in the future. Well, the future is here, kiddies, with Table Titans dropping on 28 January, with updates as needed to tell the story at a pace that best suits it. Seriously, if you haven’t listened to the latest episode of Webcomics Weekly, there’s a fascinating bit in there about how Kurtz may challenge the long-held idea that regularity trumps almost everything in webcomics — Table Titans may run a variable number of days a week depending on need, interspersing with PvP.

  It’s always interesting to watch the status quo not only get questioned, but actively experimented upon; granted, not everybody has the audience that Kurtz does, and success in such variable scheduling may be restricted to those with the most established audiences¹. Oh, and did I mention the part where Table Titans is teaming up with Wizards of the Coast to not just publish collections, but to treat the storylines as actual playable D&D adventures? That partnership, in an ongoing fashion rather than being a one-off project, looks to be the beginning of anew way of producing creative content beyond the daily strip; watch for more such expansions beyond strippery from other creators in the next couple of years.

• Hello Again Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant was one of the prettiest, most lush webcomics on the scene when it launched in June of last year, and given that the story had (over the next nine months or so) a definite beginning, middle, and end², it was a no-brainer that its 160-odd pages would get collected into a nice, neat, print collection sooner rather than later. My only question was who would land Tony Cliff’s tale of derring-do, and it’s really no surprise who won that particular sweepstakes:
  

  We’re thrilled to be bringing you @TangoCharlie’s DELILAH DIRK as a graphic novel next fall, + here’s the cover! pic.twitter.com/8lBpnW2J

  That would be the estimable :01 Books, for those of you that didn’t follow the link, and it is certain that they will give Cliff’s gorgeous story the treatment it deserves.

Oh, and nearly forgot: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$300,000 in its Kickstarter and thus will be in colo[u]r. I am nearly afraid to see what happens at US$400K, given a whole ten days still to go.

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¹ Yes, Table Titans is new, but it’s leveraging directly off of more than a dozen years of PvP, and will bring a substantial portion of that audience on day one.

² And yes, Delilah clearly had adventures before we first saw her, and yes, it wrapped with Delilah and Selim clearly heading out for more exciting times … it was still a self-contained story.

Seriously, people — all kinds of mid-week days I’m scrambling for content, and then this gets dumped on me all at once? Do none of you want a weekend?

• Hired! Jim Zub may be the smartest guy working in comics, and working every angle of them — publishing licensed work, writing original creator-owned comics, writing revived videogame IP, and thinking very hard about everything he does. To that we can now add writing for DC, as Jim Zub is taking over Birds of Prey. It’s a pretty high-profile gig, as BoP is regarded as a well-written book (having a long legacy of Gail Simone as chief wordsmith), and not just an IP-parking exercise in stasis. Here’s hoping that he can keep up all his own projects while still working for the bigs; nobody deserves success for all his hard work more, but I confess that I’m more interested in the things that are uniquely Zub than things dreamt up by somebody else getting a Zub spin. The first one is just … Zubbier? Zubesque? Zublike¹, I guess.
• Kickstarted! How did I miss this? Girl Genius is doing a videogame, and with two weeks left in the Kickstarter, they’re up over 500% of goal. More interestingly (since GG fans are pretty rabid and any project related to Agatha Heterodyne was going to be supported to the point of success), this is the first time I’ve seen what appears to be a new cultural evolution of Kickstarter projects, in the form of the Kicking It Forward pledge.

  Short form: people running Kickstarters promise to dedicate no less than 5% of the profits from their campaigns (after costs and fulfillment of their own projects; we’re talking actual profit here, not gross proceeds) to supporting other Kickstarters from other project teams in the future. This is a terrific idea, and puts me in mind of something I saw on Twitter the other day (heck if I can remember who tweeted it originally, sorry); in a nutshell, it was an opinion that people running Kickstarters who have a track record of backing other projects are more likely to see support (at least, from the twitterer in question) than somebody who’s first interaction with the platform is to ask for money. Kickstarter is a terrific tool, a key part of business plans for independent creators of all kinds, but having it be a real community may be where its full potential gets unleashed. I’m very excited by these developments.

• Unmasked! Search the archives of this page for Eben07 or Burgoon and you’ll find many references to a shadowy operative, a peerless spy-type agent and the webcomic he’s produced for a half-decade, and now he’s just gone and made himself all public and every-damn-thing. Eben Burgoon has Kickstarted a new project about an underfunded set of misfit mercenaries sent on deniable missions with a reality-show twist: every mission, somebody will be eliminated, leading to lots of funerals. The B-Squad, as it’s called, sounds like a hoot, so do give a look, yes?
• Speaking of! Kickstarters for the last time today: Ryan North is up over US$275,000 for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST, which means mini-plush Yorick skulls. Something tells me that Ryan North may be in the mood to celebrate come Monday, 17 December for the Third Annual Beguiling/Dinosaur Comics Holiday Party with fun and good times and Ryan and Kate and Joey and a Secret Santa and booze. The party starts at 7:30pm and goes until whenever Paupers Pub is tired of the shirtlessness (Ryan), tomfoolery (Joey), and knife fights (Kate). You’re on your own for bail money.

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¹ Insert your own Being Jim Zubkavich joke here. Zubkavich, Zubkavich? Zubkavich. Zub.

Speaking as a 40-something without kids, this isn’t what Christmas looks like, Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal! It’s actually what we at The Fleenplex call “Wednesdays”.

• Ryan Estrada is the latest [web]cartooner to shake up the viral internets (as he is wont to do from time to time) with a posting on Art and Creativity and How To Get Better At Them Both, which comes down to a simple premise:

  You need to screw up.

  Make mistakes, lots of them, because every one is an opportunity to learn. Challenge every bit of conventional wisdom that says something won’t work, and find a way to make it work — audiences, craft, money, everything needs to be torn down and reinvented¹. It’s a terrific read, a terrific screed (in the best sense of the word), but it strikes me that a certain subset of readers may be paying too much attention to the part that says Don’t pay attention to how they tell you to do things and not enough to the immediate followups that say … because everything they say you can’t do is a chance for you to be the first to discover a new way of doing things.

  Too many people (and I’m not even talking about creative types here; it’s a common situation in my day job, which is in IT) approach things that they find challenging with the assumption There’s a magic bullet, a formula, a secret handshake that will magically make things better; spending all this time working out the fundamentals is for suckers, I just need to get somebody that knows the secret handshake to share it with me, then all my troubles will go away and life will be awesome.

  If you’ve ever thought that way, understand that Estrada is not saying that ignoring the walls in front of you is a complete strategy; he’s saying that those fundamentals that get derided are the starting point, and the skills they engender are what will permit you to find your way around the conventional wisdom. Pay particular attention to his last paragraph:

  There’s no money in ANYTHING until someone puts something great on it. When someone tells you you’re doing it wrong, that’s your clue that you’re doing something that could change all of the rules, and a few decades from now, your style will be the one someone’s drilling into a beginner’s head, and that beginner will be coming to you for advice. Feel free to tell them what you did right, but be sure to also tell them: Do it wrong. [boldface original]

  The important words in that conclusion are “no money”, and “a few decades from now”. You can’t break the rules and expect the world to reward you tomorrow, and if (if!) you should succeed after the long, hard work, there will always be somebody breaking your new model. The fundamental lesson here is not to be a special snowflake that doesn’t have to do things the OLD WAY, OLD MAN … it’s that change is constant, and you can either ride and promote that change, or not.

  Ironically, you may find yourself in a pretty comfortable career by resisting the change than by embracing it². Until, that is, that the change becomes inescapable and you’re so invested in the old ways that you can’t adapt³. The protection against that is to do things wrong until your way becomes right, then keep doing them wronger until you create even more right ways; your revolution starts by looking in the mirror.

• Some of you may have noticed a comment that showed in Tuesday’s post for a few hours that isn’t there anymore. The poster was reporting a link in our blogroll was leading to a porn site, which is naturally something that readers of this page shouldn’t expect to encounter (unless the link is for Oglaf, and Oglaf is less about porn and more about good old fashioned smut). However, a series of tests was unable to duplicate the poster’s situation — neither our link, nor the webcomic in question showed any signs of re- or mis-direction.

  It’s possible the problem was in the poster’s own browser (I hate BHO exploits), or even a case of DNS serving up the wrong site. As a result, I felt it best to moderate the post because I didn’t want the webcomic in question to ever come up in a search in proximity to “porn site”, but since this page has a pretty strict “no deletions without a damn good reason” policy, I figured an explanation to the original poster was in order. That being done, the comment will be restored, with the name of the (as near as I can tell) innocent site redacted, in the interests of fairness to everyone.

• Wondermark calendrical marvels are back! True fact: this is the only calendar I buy for my own use each year.

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¹ Or, as we used to say back in Nerd School, If it ain’t broke, break that sumbitch and build it again different.

² See also: every pedestrian, boring form of popular, safe entertainment ever.

³ See also: every print vs web comics debate ever, and the accelerating fade out of the newspaper comic strip.

Hey, kids, did you see these dates? Things for you to do and/or celebrate, if you are special enough.

• Special people skill #1: being in or near Brooklyn as the constantly on the move Scott C has a signing for The Great Showdowns this Saturday, 8 December, from 7:00pm to 8:00pm. The fun happens at art boutique The Cotton Candy Machine¹ in Williamsburg, at the corner of Roebling & South First, convenient to the JMZ and L subway lines, as well as the dreaded G train. Also at the signing: prints, posters, and puppets.
• Special people skill #2: being in Bellevue, WA, and having the foresight to buy tickets a week ago for the annual Child’s Play Charity Dinner/Auction, kicking off at 6:30pm tomorrow night at Meydenbauer Center and going until all the money has been raised. Considering that CP2K12 is sitting at US$2.1million before this, their biggest single night of the year, gives considerable support to the notion that they may surpass last year’s crazy generous total of 3.5 literal megabucks.
• Special people skill #3: going back in time two days and wishing Little Gamers a happy internetiversary, having survived twelve years of approximately daily cartoonings. You would, naturally enough, have been met with kindly gratitude for your thoughtfulness a not-unexpected show of hostility an altogether typical reaction from self-styled juvenile delinquent wannabe Mr Madsen, and honestly, would you want anything else? While there, don’t forget to check out the progress meter for the Mongol Rally and maybe kick in a few bucks/northern bucks/aussie fun bucks/kiwi even funner bucks/pounds/euros/kronor? Call it a birthday present.

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¹ Founded by comics superstar Tara McPherson and Bay Area transplant Sean Leonard.

By now you really don’t need me to tell you about Ryan North’s Hamlet-themed Kickstarter, and to reflect that fact I’m not even going to mention the dollar figure presently attached to the campaign. I’m only mentioning it because today’s update featured an illustration by KC Green that included the most casually awesome, entirely nonplussed high-five in history, that’s all. I literally cannot look that that illustration without smiling.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, a new — and very ambitious– one opened today, as the Blind Ferret Fun-Making Concern have launched a campaign with a goal of US$78,000 to put together a documentary series focusing on what conventions are like for your favorite band of misfit Canadians. The filming part is done (you couldn’t squeeze past the BF booth in San Diego without ducking past a very attentive camera crew, which makes me wonder how Sohmer managed bathroom breaks).

  It’s got an interesting rewards structure, too — only five tiers, with pricepoints of US$15, $35, $45, $55, and $2500 (no typo), making the “Executive Producer” reward officially the most pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter offering¹ I’ve ever seen. With just a 30 day turnaround and a high target, BF will need some sustained support to meet goal.

• As promised, Jim Zub is back with a second blogposting on the economics of indy-comic publishing, this time on digital distribution. The one thing I learned almost immediately is that there really isn’t a justification for the commonly-held assumption (and I’ve held it myself²) that a three dollar comic should be much cheaper in digital form because you don’t have to pay the printer!

  Let’s work off a common enough digital price point of 99 cents; take a moment to go back to Zub’s earlier essay on indy comics and look at the pie chart. Does the wedge marked “printer” take up 2/3s of the pie? No? Then you can’t drop the price of a comic from three bucks to 99 cents and keep the same amount of money in your pocket. The slices marked “distributor” and “retailer” which made up about 65% in the print chart are replaced by “ComiXology” and “Apple/Google”, and they make up … about 65% of the digital chart.

  The printer bill does offer a savings of 20-25%, but that means a three dollar comic can come down to maybe $2.25; the 99 cent price point doesn’t work unless you sell three times more copies than at the three dollar mark. Hopefully, Zub will let us in on how both of these channels relate to/drive customers towards trade sales.

• In a similar vein about the economics and realities of being an independent creator, a pair of filmmakers talk about self-distribution when you’re not Louis CK with respect to their documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. The parts that stuck out for me are near the end of the article, making three points that successful webcomickers have made time and time again:
  

  “You have to find your audience and you have to engage them,” Pajot says. “You can’t let them find you.”

  The second major point, Swirsky adds, focuses on a work ethic beyond imagination.
  “There’s no way around it, you have to put in the time and put in the effort. You’re literally building your audience one member at a time and that can lead to something quite powerful.”

  Finally … “No one will work for your film as hard as you work for your film…. It can definitely be augmented through other people but no one will work as hard as you’re going to work.”

  Those looking for the magic bullet/secret formula/hidden handshake that guarantees creative and financial success, there it is. Find your audience, work harder than ever before, and realize that nobody cares about your success more than you, so you have to make it happen.

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¹ In terms of cost and rewards differential from the next-lowest tier.

² Although I do think there’s an argument to be made for first issues in series being very cheap (even free), and for out-of-print collections that are otherwise unobtainable to priced under their original cover prices.

Yeah, we got some stuff for you today, and I’d probably be more enthused about some of these ‘cept for the part where I’m working on a low-grade fever and feeling all blah. FEEL MY ENNUI, DAMN YOU ALL.

• Anagrammatic numbers department: Minimumble strip #250 hit the same day as Maximumble strip #520. Huh.
• Pay what you want department: The entirety of Box Brown’s Bellen is now available as a name-your-price e-book. Neat.
• Take the money and run for the border department: Yuko and Ananth are possibly terrified, maybe appalled by how much money their Kickstarter has raised. And the total keeps going up, increasing their terror and/or appallor proportionally. If they hit US$70K, I fear one or both of them may spontaneously burst.
• Why would you even … no, just no department: Never try to gross out Randy Milholland. Ever.¹
• It’s like a webcomics utility department: David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) has decided to get out of the archive-binge non-biz (on account of it makes no money) known as Archive Binge and has turned the whole shootin’ match over to the folks at Comic Rocket to run. Comic Rocket, as you may know, is a non-evil webcomic aggregator that doesn’t piss off creators², so this makes a great deal of sense. By the way, CR are trying to fund the development of a mobile version of their reading page at IndieGoGo, which might put an end to scrapers once and for all, so give ’em a look, yeah? In the meantime, you can find Archive Binge here.

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¹ Be sure to read the commentary in the bottom gutter.

² That is, make money from them by hotlinking, stripping out news/ads, or screwing with their presentations.

But before the Ryanness begins, a quick thought for a friend: Happy Two Yeariversary, Ro.¹

So! Ryans! Ryan North, that is, as the Kickstarter for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$200,000 (or 1000% of goal) and thus will have a live-action, internet-path-choosing stage adaptation in Busan, Korea, courtesy of Ryan Estrada:

To Be Or Not To Be: The Play Of The Book Of The Play. Shakespeare in Busan is going to transforming this book into a stage performance in South Korea as an incredible improvised play. AND since people all over the world are supporting this project, the performance will be livestreamed worldwide, and when a choice comes up, the entire internet will be able to vote. The play will be directed by webcartoonist and Machine of Death author Ryan Estrada. He feels sorry for his poor stage manager who has to have sets and props ready for thousand of scenes that you might not even choose, but HE KNEW THE RISKS.

Is it insane? ARE WE ALL LITERALLY INSANE?? It is impossible to tell.

Piling on top of that good news, The AV Club loved the heck out of North’s Adventure Time #10 (the choosable-path issue, coincidence!?) and also Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens. Meredith is, the last time I checked, not a Ryan, but reciprocally neither is Ryan a Meredith. They’re all doing terrific work, though, and that’s a cheering thought to take with you to the weekend. See you on Monday.

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¹ Although what’s with all the RTL text on the archive page, Randall? Jeeze.

Those of you that follow Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson in their various endeavours may know that they’re in the midst of a continent-hopping trip that took them from their home base in LA to New York, London, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and they still have parts of Europe and then Japan to go¹. Those of you that follow them may also know that Becky paints about 300 of her watercolor/gouache paintings a year, which makes for a challenge when so much of your life is taken up with travel, conventions, and suchlike. So it’s good to know that even on vacation, when the muse strikes Becky’s gonna paint the everloving heck out of that muse, and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the sketchbooks and notebooks full of words and pictures that they’re presently filling will make for one hell of a travel story and I can’t wait to see it.

• Speaking of paintings, I just learned of an art show that I had to share with you. Way back in the long-ago, there was a wonderful webcomic called Patches by the equally wonderful Kelly Vivanco, which went on hiatus at roughly the same time that Vivanco started producing moody, dreamy, whimsical-on-the-verge-of-disturbing paintings².

  If you find yourself in the Greater Los Angeles area on Saturday, you may want to head to Culver City, as Vivanco will be opening the latest solo exhibition of her paintings at Thinkspace, which is found at 6009 Washington Boulevard. The opening reception (read: snacks and booze) runs from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, and the show itself will be up for three weeks.

• Anybody have an eBay account and a sense of justice? Firstly, observe Mary Cagle’s really wonderful Kiwi Blitz, say this page right here, and note the young lady with the hat and the artificial leg. Secondly, this eBay offering, which features a suspiciously similar young lady with a hat and an artificial leg for sale, and which is not offered up by Mary Cagle. Next up, the Report Item page, which requires an eBay account, and where one can (I imagine) notify eBay that Mr or Ms Vinylcustom is violating the rights of an independent creator. Remember the rules, kids: be factual, and be polite.
• Kickstarter roundup: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is just over a week into its campaign and closing in on US$200 large³, the Johnny Wander bookstarter needs to think up more stretch goals for its last four days, as it’s blown past the last one. Also, I saw that Neil Gaiman retweeted the Kickstarter twitterfeed, and I said to myself, Self, that sounds familiar:
  

  The beautiful blue businesswoman Gabrielle explodes from Claire’s toilet and informs her she’s pregnant with the new Messiah.

  And indeed it was, which is how I learned that Sister Claire has a Kickstarter going to print the first eight chapters (or roughly 200 pages) of relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous webcomickry for your reading pleasure. I see that creator Elena Barbarich (or Yamino, if you prefer) has reached about the 86% mark in about three days, meaning she’s statistically certain to make goal⁴ and surpass it. Oh, and obligatory disclaimer: Ms Barbarich, like seemingly half the kids I know in webcomics these days (cf: Gibson, Dreistadt) went to college with my niece, so there’s that.

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¹ Even better, they managed to hop across the Hudson while in New York and visit me and my wife, on account of they are awesome people.

² They’ve always reminded me of fairy tales, at the moment just before everything starts to go seriously wrong.

³ It helps if you read that in the voice of Rodney Dangerfield when he shouts Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!

⁴ Fun fact I learned at the B9 panel at NYCC this year: Cindy Au (Director of Community for Kickstarter) shared some statistical information that included the number 1/3. Projects that fail typically do not get anywhere near goal, and almost never make it even 1/3 of the way to goal; projects that make it to 1/3 of goal almost always go on to meet or exceed goal. Neat!

One of the most fascinating discussions I’ve ever had with a creator was when Jim Zub were chatting off the record at NYCC 2011 and he broke down the numbers on making Skullkickers, with the somewhat depressing conclusion that it was costing him money to put out each issue. When I spoke to him after Skullkickers launched on Keenspot, giving away what he was already in the hole for, his readership was (comparatively) through the roof:

In our first week at Keenspot we had more unique IP visits (i.e.: new readers) than all three printings of Skullkickers #1 combined.

All those readers for free, instead of paying out of pocket to reach them! By SDCC 2012, while it still cost him out of pocket to put out the floppies (to those of us that needs our fix of mayhem), there was now an upside in trade sales:

I’m at a show and somebody says, “I love Skullkickers!”, so I ask them where they know if from, and it’s always online. So then I get to tell them, “Oh, we’re running pages from issue three online now … and we just released issue thirteen to stores.” Ten issues they haven’t seen, and there’s the trade collection sitting on the table and they have to have it.

The hard numbers are what make up the by now widely-spread blogpost that Zub put up yesterday on the economics of creator-owned comics, using a 5000-copy print run of a single issue costing three bucks. He’s adjusted some numbers to make it more accurate than in its original incarnation, which has had the effect of changing the money left over for the creative team (after distribution, printing, and publishing costs) from the pathetic US$31.50 to the slightly less pathetic US$37.50 per page on a 20 page comic. I’ve heard you’re doing pretty good in the comics game if you can produce a single finished page per day, so yeah — we’re talking well below minimum wage (split among all the creators, not just the artist), and approaching restaurant waiter with no tips territory.

For everybody who’s ever wondered, why webcomics? There’s your answer — the webcomics angle is what drives enough readers to the reprints to make this a not-quite-break-even enterprise; were Zub to abandon the monthly floppies and adopt a purely web+reprint volumes model (aka “Going Foglio”), he might even make a modest sum (in the future, well after paying his artists). We’ll have to wait until Zub shares the numbers on trade sales, convention sales (no distributor! no store!), digital sales, and website ad revenue to draw real conclusions, but for those who are wondering what kind of madman would go to all that work and not make any money:

Believe it or not, I’m not bitter about all of this. It’s the price of doing business in the mainstream comic industry via retail outlets and international distribution. That’s how it works. I just want to make it very clear so people understand what I mean when I say I’m not getting rich making my own comic. Skullkickers is the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had.

It’s that compulsion to create, even without material reward (and figuring out the slowest way to lose money on that creation) that also gets a discussion in Christopher Wright’s discussion of how he learned to stop worrying and love self-publishing. Wright found himself unable to Chucke aside the notion that self-publishing was for

• Deluded authors who were being played by vanity press outfits
• Failed authors who had more ego than talent

getting scammed by vanity presses. Even with more than a dozen years of producing Help Desk under his belt, it took a period of years to realize that webcomicking is self-publishing, and all of the arguments made against it (at least, where you aren’t paying a vanity press thousands of dollars to do things you could easily do yourself) are essentially the same as the arguments made against webcomics in their infancy. It’s an excellent companion piece to Zub’s thoughts, and well worth your time.

Awesome, I might get to use the naked wrestler guy graphic again! Longtime readers of this page may recall that Steven “Cloudy” Cloud, he of fiercesome beardery and hiatused comicking once drove to Mongolia from London in a Nissan Micra for charity and adventure.

Apparently, every half decade some webcomiker or other has to do this damn-fool thing this is now a tradition, and Pontus Madsen & Christian Fundin from Little Gamers will, with friends, be fielding two three-man teams in the 2013 Mongol Charity Rally This involves driving from Sweden to Ulan Baator, Mongolia in two tiny-ass cars via central Europe, Russia, and a series of countries whose names end in -stan.

Want to see six grown men do something incredibly unpredictable to benefit two charities? Team Venture has an Indiegogo page set up so you can kick a few bucks in and send them on the adventure of a lifetime and/or hurtling to their dooms. I suppose it depends on whether you like them or not.

Oh, and should you, like the members of Team Venture, ever find yourself at an ex-Soviet checkpoint in the middle of absolutely nowhere, being pestered by a man with a uniform and a Kalashnikov¹ for a bribe? Cloudy says the secret is to enthusiastically smile and nod and thank them profusely until they figure that you just don’t understand them and send you on your way. It’s possible at some point in the negotiation they just decide to shoot you, but I’m pretty sure that Cloud’s beard made him bulletproof, so maybe that’s why he made it home safe. Look, just don’t die out there and we’ll call it good, okay?

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¹ Fun fact: Mikhail Kalashnikov is still alive.

Today is Jon Rosenberg’s annual reminder that he and I are connected by the day of our respective births, no matter how he might try to forget that fact. Nevertheless, in an act of stunning generosity he texted me four years ago to congratulate me on my shift from list 3A to 3B, which is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Happy Birthday, Jon and remember — you don’t want to break out the stasis chamber until next year when you hit 40.

In the meantime, life has gifted me with some coincidental birthday presents.¹

• Present Number One: Octopus Pie is back, and it looks to becoming at us three times a week until Meredith Gran says “enough”. On the one hand, I’m extremely bummed that the reason that Gran is back to updating Octopie with a vengeance is she’s finished her work on Marceline and the Scream Queens on account of I love that series and this is irrefutable proof that there’s only one issue left.

  On the other hand, I’ll take Octopus Pie three times a week over nearly anything in the world, especially as Gran does something so very, very rare in large-cast storytelling — taking the time to flesh out the peripheral characters², give them their own stories and lives and decisions that happen while the main cast are doing other things. Nobody’s a placeholder, put into storage when off-screen, just waiting for Eve or Hanna or Marek to interact with them; Ollie, Julie, and even Puget Sean are people, and people aren’t static.³ Everybody’s got something interesting for us to discover about them.

  Typing that out, I realize that in that respect, Octopus Pie is actually quite similar to Adventure Time and that just makes another reason why Mer was a crazy good choice to set loose in the sandbox of characters that is the Land of Ooo. A’course, she’s only better with her own characters, and now’s the time to get caught up with Octopus Pie.

• Present Number Two: Oh, and there’s a new episode of the increasingly-misnamed Webcomics Weekly; Scott, Kris, Brad, and Dave have so much fun together that I’d listen to them read the phone book. In fact, I’m listening to it now as I type, and that means that I’m doing neither thing very well, so I’m going to focus on the listening part now. See everybody tomorrow, which is not my birthday and therefore a much less interesting day.

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¹ Cue Andy Serkis: Precioussssss.

² In this case, Marigold — once a stoner artisinal soap-maker, presently working for The Man and reasonably okay with that, despite feeling a bit adrift since breaking up with Will.

Oh, and sorry about the sparkly text, but it’s justified in this case.